Desktop virtualization extends the boundaries of the digital campus at the ČZU

The ČZU fosters environmental responsibility and respect in its students to ensure sustainable living for future generations. In 2020, it retained its position as the most sustainable university in the Czech Republic. The university is based on a unique green modern campus in Suchdol.

Investments in state-of-the-art educational technologies

The ČZU is a leading educational and research institution, fostering its students’ responsibility and respect for the environment in specialized fields such as forestry and environmental sciences with state-of- the-art technologies. In 2020, the university even retained its position as the most sustainable Czech university, primarily thanks to its headquarters—the unique, modern, digitally advanced “green” campus in Suchdol, Prague.

Modern educational technologies, software and applications have started testing the limits of the existing IT solutions. A significant majority of these solutions would not run on the students’ and teachers’ private desktops, so the university began investing in a more advanced virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) to enable its students and staff to study and work from anywhere without restrictions.

Providing stable and secure remote access to students and staff

The ČZU needed to offer its staff and students secure and stable access to the technologies, applications and materials they needed. Connections to private desktops did not allow the use of all the software and applications required for studies, making the conditions for studying and working remotely less than ideal. There was a risk that unanswered demands from teachers and students for more effective hybrid learning would lead to the departure of both staff and students.

Virtual desktops as a key aspect of remote studies

Based on learning experiences throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, the university decided to upgrade the existing Omnissa Horizon® system to its newer Horizon 8.4 version, while significantly expanding the number of virtual desktops, especially for students. The university IT team continues to virtualize desktops and make it possible for employees and students to work and study quickly and securely from anywhere. The university currently runs the Horizon platform version 8.4 for a total of 500 licenses. A pilot implementation for more than 2,000 students is also currently underway, and future plans are to expand to all students and employees. The ČZU currently has around 30,000 students as well as approximately 2,500 university workers.

“After a successful rollout for university staff, the focus has now shifted to student desktops. Many students rely on specialized applications and software that can’t be installed on personal devices, making virtual desktops essential for their coursework,” explains Richard Tůma, CIO at ČZU.

Simplified workstation management and high scalability save time and costs

Cost and IT specialist time savings are not the only advantages brought to the university by the simplified workstation management and high scalability features. “With Horizon in place, cybersecurity is strengthened through streamlined patch management and more efficient backups,” Tůma says.

Desktop virtualization will offer the university staff and students a comfortable and modern environment and will also reduce staff and student turnover. A modern workplace and campus will also attract new talent. At the same time, technologies help save costs. As the university develops and uses new applications, Horizon will allow it to use existing hardware capacities and, by extension, improve costs as the ČZU will not need to purchase new equipment.

Horizon can utilize existing hardware capacities to operate virtual desktops, thus reducing the need for new hardware and significantly contributing to ecofriendlier IT at the university. A virtual digital campus is also an ideal university building management and cost structuring tool, allowing the university to monitor and optimize the capacities of important resources such as water, electricity, waste disposal and data.

Omnissa is the obvious choice for further challenges

The Horizon desktop virtualization solution enables desktop operating systems to be run in a data center with remote access, providing several key advantages over a standard physical computer. All workloads are handled in the university’s own private data centers. To extend virtual desktops to students, the university is preparing to use a pay-as-you-go model for Azure, Google and AWS public clouds. This means it will be prepared for the moment when a huge number of students connect without needing to deploy physical hardware that would otherwise be idle for most of the year.

The university uses a hybrid cloud solution enabling dynamic scaling. The story of ČZU proves that virtual desktops are suitable not only for large companies but may also be successfully implemented in the most advanced university campuses as tools that can enhance the quality of teaching and make it more accessible to all.