Graphic Intensive Workstations in Azure 

Executive Summary  

The higher education client is a prestigious Australian University that has greatly impacted the world of academics through their research and education. They connected with cubesys to find an infrastructure solution, with the main goal of providing their students the means to run graphically intense applications remotely.  

The Customer  

Founded in 1909, the customer is a public research institution committed to building a better future for their students and community alike. They invest heavily in research and have pioneered notable inventions, and boast numerous campus’ across their state to cater to their local communities. The university is currently home to over 55k students and employs 7k full-time equivalent staff members.   

The Problem  

The client was initially using an end-user computing environment hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS) IaaS workloads and VMWare Horizon as the control plane. 

The university’s Engineering Faculty students needed to run graphically intensive workloads, requiring VM’s (Virtual Machines) with GPU’s. Unfortunately, this capability was not offered by AWS at the time, leaving students with a slow and frustrating experience.  

The Solution  

cubesys stepped in with their deep expertise in Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) and VMWare Horizon and combined these technologies, to provide the university’s Engineering Faculty with graphics capabilities matching their needs.   

Now, graphically intense applications such as AutoDesk, Solidworks etc., can be catered for and provide students with a ‘best-in-class’ experience.  As a bonus, the client also leveraged Windows 10 Multi-Session, which is only available on Azure. This allows the migration of the environment from one user per VM, to multiple users per VM, reducing cloud spend and operational overheads.  

In fact, the experience was so good that the client decided to move the rest of the University faculties, students and staff, across to Azure.  

It was through cubesys’ years of experience in virtual desktop infrastructure and virtual desktop computing that they were able to deliver a solution bespoke to the exact needs of the University. Additionally, cubesys now provide the customer augmented managed services for the AVD environment ensuring everything is working correctly. 

The Result  

Now, the client can run graphically intense applications, such as computer-aided design (CAD) or media manipulation software, that they were not able to run previously. On top of that, their desired outcome has been further outdone by cubesys’ additional inclusion of Windows 10 Multi-Session. This has made the use of graphic cards more efficient by allowing multiple students to use the same virtual machines. 

The client and cubesys relationship is continuing to drive efficiencies and maintain the AVD environment for students & staff alike, through the cubesys AVD managed services.