DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF A VIRTUAL COMPUTING ENVIRONMENT FOR SCHOOLS AND OFFICES

This Paper: "Design and implementation of a virtual computing environment for schools and offices" aims at solving issues that range from reducing information technology costs to making information technology as mobile as possible. Users want to be able to access their documents, use their important applications, and even their entire desktops on the go that is from anywhere, anytime with any device. These are just a part of the numerous issues this project aims at solving. Another issue is the problem of students and faculty having to source, purchase and install applications they need for study, work and leisure on their personal computers. These applications are very difficult and expensive to purchase. This hinders academic research and students' experience with applications that involve their courses' of study. Yet another issue this project sets out to solve is for organizations. In small and medium enterprises, the high cost of IT is a huge problem. The project helps these enterprises to convert capital expenditure to operational expenditure. The large organizations require increased security, management, maintenance, and data redundancy. All of which the solutions from this paper takes care of. In a single solution, a virtual computing environment is created via application and desktop virtualization. Applications and desktops are hosted in data centres on high resource servers and then delivered to users over a network. For demonstration in this project however, the hosting platform and delivery is scaled down to just one hardware server running logical servers hosting a couple of applications deployed to a select number of users. Coupled with the positive results from a survey that aimed to find out the awareness and willingness of users towards the idea of the project, this project has been able to achieve the delivery of work and academic software packages to concurrent users on the following operating system platforms: Windows 7, Mac OS X Mavericks, Android 4.2.2 and iOS 7 while also solving the issues of security, management, maintenance and data redundancy for large organizations, high initial costs for SMEs, mobility for all types of users, and licensing, sourcing and installation in academic environments.