Virtualization in Education IT. Benefits and Challenges. | Parallels Insights

When considering virtualization in education IT, it’s important to note that in today’s skilled and certification-hungry world, education has gone from being just textbooks to e-learning and virtual classrooms. Education has become more collaborative than ever before. Tech-savvy students settle for no less than curated digital content and personalized guidance.

To cater to such demands and technological disorder, education institutes must offer a quality learning experience to every student regardless of where they’re located. It’s an open secret that this kind of personalized learning content can be delivered within a limited budget—but only with a virtualized IT infrastructure setup.

Benefits of Virtualization in Education

Using virtual learning infrastructure based on VDI technology can prove to be extremely beneficial for the education sector. VDI helps manage the time and effort required to manage the collection of endpoint devices in an educational setting, and has the following benefits:

1. Faster Device Allocation and Deletion

Students attend a school or university for a limited period. Setting up the environment for a particular student and deleting it before their graduation is a slow process that requires manual effort. Doing so with virtual desktops, however, is an automated process that can be completed in seconds. Hence virtualization ensures faster device allocation and deletion.

2. Bring Your Device (BYOD)

In an educational setting, you can utilize visualization and allow students and teachers to bring their own devices, thus improving flexibility and reducing organizational cost.

3. Ease of Management

With virtualization, there is no need to manually install or update the operating system, applications, and other software on each endpoint. It can all be done with ease, from a central location, thus making management easier.

4. Better Security

The data of students and staff alike are stored on a centralized database instead of being spread around the endpoints. Hence, virtualization also benefits the education sector by improving security.

5. Better Support for Remote Students

Virtualization also makes it possible for students to work on their assignments from home, or to study remotely when such circumstances arise.

6. Custom Image Support

In the education sector, each grade student can have different OS and application requirements. Installing different versions of desktops on individual endpoints can be a daunting task. With virtualization, it is easy to simply create a base golden image for students of each grade, and reuse it by deploying it across different endpoints in seconds.

7. Support for Visting Professors

Visiting professors are common in university environments. They can visit for a certain period, and issuing them a virtual desktop for that short duration is easy with virtualization.

8. Support for both Mac and Windows

When implementing the bring your device policy, you can create problems in an educational setting if there is a mixture of both Mac and Windows devices. With virtualization technology, Mac and Windows users can access the same virtual desktop, regardless of the device being used.

Challenges of virtualization in education

Without careful planning and expert implementation, adopting newer technology can be frustrating for both teachers and students. Challenges are inherent with any virtualization solution. If chosen without proper research, a virtualization solution can cause upfront investment costs due to additional hardware requirements.

Also, many virtualization solutions have tricky licensing. It’s necessary to understand how licensing of the virtualization solution complements your infrastructure capacity planning.

Security is one of the biggest challenges for the education IT infrastructure due to increasingly high-profile data breaches. Confidential data related to research and exams can cause problems if compromised. Lastly, for most of the virtualization solution, infrastructure setup is complex, and education IT might have to hire experts to build and deploy it successfully.

How Parallels RAS helps

Parallels® Remote Application Server (RAS) is an industry-leading virtualization solution that offers both application and desktop delivery under a single license. Parallels RAS is an all-in-one solution that doesn’t need additional hardware components. It’s user-friendly with a minimal learning curve—you don’t need to hire any experts. Moreover, it offers prebuilt templates that you can use to deploy in both the cloud and on-premises. The ability for quick provisioning and auto-scaling of resources stands out. Parallels RAS also supports all major hypervisors.

Parallels RAS reduces the risk of data loss and malicious activity by using policies that limit access based on user, group permissions, locations, and devices. In addition, Parallels RAS supports FIPS 140-2, Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption and multifactor authentication (MFA).

Parallels RAS provides a unified and intuitive management console, configuration wizards and customizable set of tools that can be used to easily configure remote desktops and VDI.

Try your 30-day trial of Parallels RAS and experience the changes it can offer to your organization today!

References

Virtualization in education IT | https://searchdatacenter.techtarget.com/tip/Server-virtualization-training-and-education-needed-for-successful-virtualization-rollouts

Virtualization in education IT | https://www.techopedia.com/definition/719/virtualization

Virtualization in education IT | https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0360131516302184

Virtualization in education IT | https://www.researchgate.net/publication/322711546_Virtualization_in_Education_Portable_Network_Laboratory

Virtualization in education IT RAS | https://www.parallels.com/blogs/ras/education-it/