Performance Evaluation of VDI-Based Private Cloud Technology for Education and Research

Enhancing educational and research environments in universities and research institutions is continually chal-lenging. Currently, educational organizations provide physical facilities to their staff and students. Such setups can be expensive, inflexible and difficult to maintain and suffer from the limitations on the services provided by their traditional information technology infrastructures to their various end users. Also, the overheads which are caused by managing, upgrading and maintaining all the traditional IT components and services are very high compared to virtualization environments. The aim is to utilize and to enhance one of the cloud computing technologies, Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), for supporting teaching and research activities within an educational organization. Cloud computing has redefined the view of computing resources as a framework where these resources are provisioned dynamically on demand. With cloud computing, these resources can be delivered to users across geographical and time boundaries. For example, virtualization stores the resulting virtualized desktop on a remote central server, instead of on the local storage of a remote client; thus, when users work from their remote desktop client, all of the programs, applications, processes, and data used are kept and run centrally. In this article, we explore VDI platforms and evaluate their suitability for universities and research institutes. We study the performance for these well-known VDI platforms, namely VMware Horizon and Citrix XenDesktop, using the Login VSI tool as software benchmarking. Performance evaluations are conducted using homogeneous architectural designs.