4 University Libraries Move Down the Virtualization Path

For at least the past three years, people have been saying that virtual desktops will take off. But while universities have piloted desktop virtualization, full-blown deployments are fairly new.

"Everybody in the industry says this will be the year of desktop virtualization, and we're still not seeing a huge uptake, but the interest is definitely there,"  said Karin Kelley, a virtualization analyst at The 451 Group.

Along with healthcare and government, higher education has become one of the strongest adopters of virtualization. And it makes sense for universities because they want to centrally manage labs and give students access to remote labs through their mobile devices.

"Server virtualization now is pretty much a no-brainer for everybody," she said. "It works and it makes sense to consolidate in the data center, so I think everyone's kind of working on that already." 

On campus, university libraries are virtualizing servers and desktops, collaborating with other campus organizations, and saving money and staff time. Keep reading to find out what State University of New York at Stony Brook, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Northwestern University and the University of Connecticut have learned in the virtualization process.

Libraries virtualize servers, move into desktops

SUNY at Stony Brook

In the late 1990s, SUNY at Stony Brook started using thin clients as Internet kiosks in libraries and expanded them to library classrooms, circulation terminals and reference desks, said Andrew White, the interim dean and director of libraries at Frank Melville Jr. Memorial Library.

Between 2007 and 2009, the library consolidated more than 20 physical servers down to a handful of actual servers.

"We needed a significant amount of money for the initial buy-in, and that was hard for people to understand,"  White said.

He helped administrators understand by telling them that virtualization would provide a more efficient and economical service in the long-term and lead to more uptime. Instead of having 10 devices break daily, the 50 thin clients he wanted to purchase would go down when the server did maybe once a month.

Northwestern University

Three or four years ago, Northwestern University Library replaced hardware-based servers with virtual ones.

"The payback was pretty much instant in terms of the return on investment," said Stu Baker, associate university librarian for library technology.

Along with virtualizing servers, the library investigated and deployed a small cluster of virtual desktops in the Information Commons. That project was going well, and the library hoped to expand it this year.

But the library needs to beef up resources, and with tight budgets, it's not feasible to do so now. Because virtual desktop technology advances so rapidly, the staff wanted to hold off for a year or two to see how the technology develops. 

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

In years past, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Library bought primary and backup machines for critical operations. That financial model doesn't work anymore, said Dave Pcolar, interim head of library systems and lead of IT research and development.

And on top of that, the majority of the servers for the 16 campus libraries were utilized at or below 25 percent of their capacity.

"So with approximately 100 servers out there running, the vast majority of them being Linux, it didn't make good financial sense to run that way."

The libraries virtualized about 80 percent of the servers for the libraries, which include 1,300 workstations, about 250 staff and about 40,000 journal and electronic resource subscriptions.

University of Connecticut

Four years ago, University of Connecticut Libraries started virtualizing servers. But until recently, the libraries didn't have the money to make the big initial investment in virtual desktops on its own.

"Sometimes it's hard for libraries," said Tony Molloy, information technology services team leader and server administrator. "They don't always have the IT resources they need to do something like this."

During peak times like finals, lines of students wait for the 300 library computers to research, write papers and print documents.

"We knew it didn't make any sense to buy any more physical machines because for a good portion of the year, like in the summer, they would go unused," Molloy said.

University libraries partner with other campus organizations

Through a collaboration with the schools of Business and Engineering, the three departments bought the infrastructure recently to move toward virtualizing desktops.

As a result, the library is piloting the Ericom AccessNow Remote Desktop Protocol client, which gives students and staff access to academic software on a virtual desktop. With an HTML5 compliant browser or Chrome operating system device, they can use programs like statistical analysis that are more complex to install on a student computer.

Moving forward, the department team will figure out how to develop a virtualization model where other departments can chip in money and time to use the infrastructure. And as they're collaborating, they're realizing that they offer similar services and can share knowledge.

"This is really the first time that UConn has sort of had this cross-academic collaboration that we're doing, which we're really excited about," Molloy said.

Northwestern University Library is also doing a pilot with central IT and one school to create a multi-tenant virtual environment, basically a virtual data center. Central IT has more sophisticated backups, and the library's mass storage is there anyway.

"We're experimenting with that because we would like to move a lot of our infrastructure out of our library and into the safe and secure data center," Baker said.

This year, the library hopes to move out of the pilot phase into a production environment. But the organizations are still working out how to manage expansion of the system, who will pay for it, and how to manage change and escalate issues.
 

Libraries save money, staff time with virtualization

By using thin clients and virtualized servers, both SUNY at Stony Brook and UNC at Chapel Hill have saved time and money.

Library IT staff no longer have to manually manage machines or have redundant hardware. They can maintain servers centrally, fix problems from any location and do more work without adding staff. And maintenance is much easier.

"Not only do you have increased reliability of your server infrastructure and the ability to load balance between servers, but you can make configuration changes farely fast," Pcolar said.

Virtual desktops have allowed SUNY at Stony Brook to provide students and staff with applications without installing them on each physical computer. But a certified medical exam from a national board would not run in a virtualized environment because of certain security measures designed to make sure multiple users aren't accessing the same exam.

"Virtualization is not the silver bullet for everything," White said. "There are apps that just do not play nicely in a virtualized environment."

Also, certain Java code, and sometimes Flash and multimedia, can bog down a server that's trying to run multiple sessions. But more applications are now working well in a virtualized environment, he said.

He uses a combination of Citrix, VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V and said that each one meets different application and server needs. For example, if you need to connect to a virtualized desktop environment remotely over slower bandwidth, Citrix tends to work best.

If you're dealing with applications that still have 16-bit code, VMware virtual desktops work better because you can sandbox each session,. If the session fails, it won't take up the whole server.

From an enterprise standpoint, VMware has the tools to change things on the fly, is flexible, and provides load balancing and disaster recovery components, Pcolar said. It's not cheap, but it's a good product.

You can move down a tier to a XenServer or Hyper-V.

"But what you give up in that is the ability to kind of manage a larger infrastructure and move between clusters of machines and physical locations seamlessly," Pcolar said.

Smaller libraries that have few resources could probably depend on a Zen server.

Virtualization has also helped control both versions and licenses. For example, Adobe Photoshop is an expensive application for the libraries, so SUNY at Stony Brook allows 20 people to use a license at the same time. When the 21st person tries to access the program, it refuses the connection. 

And on top of that, the thin clients only have to be replaced after seven or eight years compared to a three-year cycle for computers. The thin clients in the Health Sciences library have only had to be replaced once in the last 10 years.
 

Future plans for Northwestern

Northwestern University Library is considering a virtual classroom environment that would allow it to eliminate computer labs that are not being used as much. In that environment, professors could give the library a portfolio of apps they want for a quarter, and staff could set them up on the virtual desktops. 

But the library would probably like to have the virtual classroom environment in the main IT center because bandwidth and storage shouldn't be a problem there, Baker said.

"We would have to beef up our storage and centralized computing capacity quite a bit, so we're not really sure we want to do that in the library per se, which is why this multi-tenant environment in the data center so to speak is very much of interest to us."