Throughout the year here at EWG our school has had the great opportunity to take advantage of a very powerful software technology suite called VMware Horizon. VMware Horizon is a suite of products and technologies designed to help IT Administrators deliver desktops and applications. This helps the school district to allow students, teachers, and administrators access to programs or other resources that they may not have had access to before.
The great part about this software is it removes the requirements for a specific type of machine. That means you will no longer need a Windows based desktop to use programs like Google SketchUp. This also helps teachers to use special education programs without having to worry about remembering server credentials. The program is designed to load everything in a browser or through a client you download called VMware Horizon Client.
Another great feature that we are able to take advantage of is the ability to provide out a full virtualized desktop infrastructure (VDI) for applications that require a high-end graphics card. We currently have a class running here at EWG (Solidworks) that takes advantage of this solution.Solidworks is very graphic intensive and requires a high end computer with serious power. VMware Horizon allows the students to connect to the server hosting these virutualized desktops and the server does all the rendering/ thinking with very powerful processors, lots of RAM, and specialized graphics cards made for VDI. The students can use their Chromebooks to connect to this in a web browser or the VMware Horizon client can be used which is available for PC, Mac, iPad, Android, and other devices. This lets them do their work wherever they are, not just in the computer lab!
