University of Bristol delivers boundaryless education through GPU-powered VDI

With academic excellence and digital equity as core goals, the University of Bristol set out to modernize its IT foundations to ensure all students and researchers could access the flexible, high-performance computing resources essential for world-class learning and discovery. The university worked with Xtravirt to build a GPU-powered VDI platform using Omnissa Horizon®. The result? Seamless remote access, improved student outcomes, enhanced sustainability, and optimized resource usage—plus universally accessible education and research, and digital equity for the student community.

A digital strategy for the boundaryless university

With over 30,000 students, nearly 9,000 staff, and an annual research income of more than GBP 300 million, the University of Bristol is a major academic powerhouse. In today’s competitive global marketplace, it remains successful by focusing on its long-term vision: boundaryless education and research that is accessible to all. That means providing universally available, high-quality academic experiences to students, researchers, academics and partners—regardless of geography or personal circumstances. Its digital strategy, launched in 2019 with sustainability, equity and accessibility as foundational principles, is a key part of its plans to realize this vision.

IT complexity hinders academic excellence and equity

As Chief Digital and Information Officer at the University of Bristol, Keith Woolley is very clear on his role. “My job is to make working here easy”, Woolley explains. “When research is simple and frictionless, we attract the best educators in the world and the best research—and with that, the brightest students.”

However, the university’s patchwork of virtual desktop and end-user computing solutions was creating the very friction Woolley and his team aimed to eliminate. Microsoft Azure Virtual Desktop, Windows Remote Desktop, VPNs and other legacy platforms were all in the mix, with multiple points of entry and limited standardization. This prompted a focus on improving security as well as performance and latency issues— a concern for disciplines with high-performance compute requirements, such as engineering and data science.

For Woolley’s IT teams, it meant managing a wide range of hardware, BIOS and OS configurations across the University’s different departments, which made it difficult to package software in a uniform way. Ahead of each academic year, they had to rip down and rebuild all systems to ensure software was up to date and met all course requirements. This time-intensive process took the teams months to complete, making it very challenging to meet the needs of each new academic year and placing significant stress on internal IT resources.

Labs were traditionally built around expensive, fixed-location PCs. The hardware was often under-utilized outside scheduled teaching times, it was energy intensive, and it offered limited flexibility for hybrid or remote education.

Of particular concern for the university was that the set-up was contributing to an inequitable learning experience for students. For example, academic staff noted that capable students in the engineering department who didn’t have their own powerful PCs were penalized because they couldn’t perform the necessary functions as well or as fast as their peers.

Overall, delivering a scalable, consistent, and efficient desktop experience across the university’s faculties — or effectively supporting its expanding global research collaborations — had become increasingly difficult.

Digital strategy execution with Omnissa and Xtravirt

Woolley’s team launched a VDI solution built on Omnissa Horizon, powered by a new GPU farm, and running on its private cloud. The university’s long-standing partnership with Xtravirt was critical to the Horizon VDI deployment. Xtravirt provided technical expertise in VDI, cloud and application delivery, and supported the design, rollout and subsequent management of the solution. Xtravirt’s close collaboration with Woolley and his IT colleagues, as well as academic teams helped ensure the VDI platform met teaching and research needs, as well as operational demands.

“Xtravirt are very much viewed as part of my strategic leadership team,” says Woolley. “They’re ideally placed to support our ambitions in VDI and cloud. More than that, they’re a trusted business partner. It was Xtravirt who led us to Horizon—a natural next step in our evolution.”

The initial deployment focused on the engineering department, where the university had planned to refresh the lab PCs by rolling out expensive, high-spec machines. Instead, Woolley and his team used Horizon to provision virtual desktops running on server-grade NVIDIA GPUs in its datacenter.

Horizon ensures the low-latency, high-throughput performance that students and researchers need to access the university’s powerful computing resources, from any device with an internet connection—on campus or remote. Its co-location within the university’s private cloud plays a critical role: it minimizes data transit delays enabling the smooth, responsive delivery of complex workloads. It also ensures that all virtual desktops, applications, and user data remain securely contained within a controlled infrastructure.

“With Horizon, even the most complex workloads and demanding academic applications, like GPU-accelerated rendering, 3D modelling, simulation or AI processing, are available without delays in data transit,” says Woolley. “It’s the foundation for the secure, uncompromising, and friction-free user experience we want.”

World-class technology supporting world-wide research

Woolley is clear that the success of the VDI project is measured by its long-term contribution to the university’s academic strength and global reputation. “We are a world-leading university, and I’ve always said that to stay at the top, we need a world-leading IT department backed by world-leading technology,” he says. “With Omnissa and Xtravirt, we have exactly that.”

Beyond long-term academic gains, the project is already delivering tangible benefits—from advancing digital equity and accessibility, to driving sustainability, and strengthening operational efficiency, security, and compliance.

Digital equity and accessibility

Students on the Computer-Generated Imagery (CGI) unit can now run intensive processes on the university’s VDI, regardless of their personal device’s capabilities. “Thanks to the GPU-powered Horizon VDI solution, students are now completing tasks up to 12 hours faster—slashing processing times by as much as 75% compared to traditional laptops. Plus, we now have the capacity to support up to 1,000 concurrent VDI users,” says William Davies, project manager for the VDI initiative.

This has removed a significant barrier to participation: students who lacked access to high-performance desktops can now demonstrate their true capabilities and fully engage with compute-heavy coursework.

Professors and teachers have already reported improved quality of their students’ work and more accurate grading, as they can assess the work itself, not the limitations of the device it was created on.

Students and staff can also work securely and seamlessly from anywhere, a key milestone in the delivery of the university’s digital strategy. “When we first started this journey, our goal was to ensure digital equity was at the heart of the solution,” says Davies. “Today, Horizon VDI helps us deliver on that promise. It enables us to provide a single, consistent platform that’s accessible to anyone with a device and an internet connection.”

For example, a group of researchers in Africa can now remotely access Bristol’s infrastructure to run data and processing-intensive workloads without needing to move large datasets. This enables full research productivity with only basic local devices and demonstrates the university’s commitment to boundaryless education and secure global collaboration.

Sustainability and optimization

By virtualizing compute resources, the university is maximizing the value of its assets. “Previously, desktop PCs sat idle after hours,” says Jane McGrath, senior project manager for digital strategy at the University of Bristol. “Now, through Horizon VDI, we can repurpose that unused capacity overnight to support high intensity processing. It’s a smarter, more sustainable use of resources. It reduces hardware waste, cuts energy consumption, and extends the life of our assets. We’re also exploring intelligent network technologies that can automatically power down devices or redirect energy to more sustainable workloads.”

IT efficiency, security, and compliance

For the university’s IT teams, the stateless, centrally managed Horizon VDI platform has transformed how desktops are deployed and maintained. Dynamic provisioning and streamlined updates have significantly reduced operational overhead, while application packaging is becoming far more efficient.

With a tightly controlled group of gold images, the team minimizes software packaging and maintenance activities and secures consistent deployment across the environment, removing the annual back-to-school headache of previous years.

“The compatibility issues we used to face across hardware and operating systems are gone,” says Davies. “With Horizon, we have one platform, one image, and full consistency. That alone saves us valuable time and strengthens our compliance posture. It also lays the foundation for on-demand application delivery using solutions like Omnissa App Volumes, which we’re now evaluating.”

Security and compliance have also been enhanced through Horizon’s integrated hardened gateway services, which ensure all remote connections are both authenticated and encrypted.

A scalable digital model for campus and beyond

The engineering faculty was the first to benefit from the VDI transformation, providing them with an alternative, flexible access to specialist computing capability, previously only possible via dedicated labs. This use case now serves as a repeatable blueprint for other faculties across the university and as demand grows from additional disciplines, the university is expanding its Horizon VDI platform campuswide.

Looking ahead, the university plans to integrate AI into research and teaching using the NVIDIA-powered virtual labs. To support secure collaboration with external research partners, Woolley and his team also anticipate using Horizon VDI for multi-tenant, isolated desktop environments, which would enable secure, segregated access for external research partners.

At the same time, significant investment is going into an AI-enabled modern network program. This initiative will improve performance monitoring, user experience, and cybersecurity, while providing the high-speed, resilient connectivity needed to scale Horizon VDI globally.

“It’s a really exciting time for us and for what we’re building here,” says Woolley. “We’re only at the beginning of this journey but now we have the complete platform. We can proudly say we offer boundaryless education and research, along with true digital equity for our student community. And I’m confident our collaboration with Omnissa and Xtravirt will continue to evolve our VDI environment and support our global ambitions.”