Creating dynamic teaching labs with Citrix and Liquidware

This is a guest post by Jason E. Smith – VP Products, Liquidware.

Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops keeps digital workspaces at universities and other institutions of higher education dynamic, enabling faculty and students to access a Windows desktop from the cloud or an on-prem data center instantly. Ensuring that students have the applications required to perform work in lab/classroom environments is an ongoing challenge for education workspace administrators. For IT departments to continually spin up unique Windows desktops with labs applications for university students is a time consuming task.

By combining Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops and Liquidware FlexApp, Windows workspace admins can now size, design, and deliver applications in teaching labs dynamically. FlexApp focuses only on attaching applications to an otherwise easy-to-manage base image created with Citrix Provisioning or with Citrix App Layering. This approach overcomes base image sprawl, assigns applications dynamically, and eases the updates of applications. FlexApp enables you transform static education labs into dynamic labs, so that the same devices can serve students across curricula, by delivering only the applications that they need on demand at login.

So, how does this work in practice? A few simple steps are all that is required:

• Applications for labs are packaged by IT for mass delivery to classroom environments.
• Context-aware filters are created to determine who, what, where, and when an application should be delivered.
• Upon logging into a Citrix desktop, unique applications appear instantly via Citrix and Liquidware technologies.
• FlexApp applications look native to other applications and to the operating system itself.
• FlexApp applications need only be packaged once and work across your current and future versions of Windows operating systems.

By attaching applications with FlexApp versus application isolation, a substantial number of applications can be deployed with near 100 percent compatibility. Furthermore, updates to the base image can be facilitated separately and handled with Citrix Provisioning and/or Citrix App Layering.

Because of FlexApp’s high compatibility rate with many of the leading applications used across academic institutions, creating dynamic labs is simple and straight-forward. Academic institutions gain the following compelling advantages:

• The same labs can support students of different disciplines. Applications can be delivered on demand — even changing hourly — as students revolve through lab periods.
• Labs can expand or contract with the shifting size of student populations per curriculum.
• Labs can be dynamically set up in any room that house the endpoint devices and related lab resources.
• Endpoint devices no longer need to be sized to the applications that will be installed on them. In fact, thin clients can be used, saving costs because applications will reside on centralized hosts.
• Applications that need more CPU, GPU, RAM, or disk can be supplied by diverting more host resources to those applications.
• As student populations by major grow or recede, former dedicated labs can be repurposed to support multiple disciplines, ensuring that there will always be adequate labs for the number of students needing them.
• Labs can be expanded to off-campus facilities, as well.

Coupling FlexApp’s on-demand, “follow-me” approach with Citrix’s Future of Work philosophy makes the combination a powerful force for universities to deliver applications that keep their students happy and productive. This approach supports on-premises deployments as well as cloud, thereby enabling IT even more flexibility and agility for provisioning of labs.