Today is my last day working for the University. I have really enjoyed working on the Cloud Desktop project but I must now leave it the capable hands of my colleagues who will continue to roll-out the service across the University.
UCISA 2013 poster winner
Just heard we won best poster at UCISA 2013!
Our cloud desktop project @unilincoln_ict @unilincoln just won best poster at #ucisa13 , well done Leigh Haynes.
— Drew Cook (@drew_cook) March 14, 2013
UCISA 2013 poster
The below poster was displayed at the UCISA 2013 Annual Management Conference which was held in Liverpool on the 13th – 15th March. The formal poster session is designed to share some of the innovations and excellence in practice from institutions with colleagues and peers from across the sector.
If you attended the conference and have any questions or comments about the University of Lincoln Cloud Desktop, please feel free to leave a reply.
Cloud Desktop usage
Part of the Cloud Desktop solution is a monitoring application called Terminal Services Log which provides powerful and comprehensive reporting on the usage of the service.
The Cloud Desktop service has now been live in the Library for almost 6 months and so I thought it would be interesting to take a look and some of the data we have collected so far.
We currently have 265 Cloud Desktop terminals in the Library.
How many of these are being used concurrently?
How many personal desktops does the Cloud Desktop serve each day?
Behind the curtain
For those that are interested in the technology behind the Cloud Desktop, here is a high level diagram of the Remote Desktop Services Architecture that makes the magic possible.
The servers that power the solution are the latest Gen8 model from HP. Each server blade has dual 8-core multithreaded processors (giving a total of 32 CPUs presented), 64GB of RAM and dual solid state drives for high I/O. Each blade has been specified to host up to 180 user sessions. The solution can be easily scaled-out by simply adding another blade.