The MAGIC of VDI (A USE CASE : CLASS MANAGEMENT SYSTEM ON TOP OF VMWARE HORIZON )

VDI Use Case – Class management System.

Recently we got a special request from a customer. They wanted a solution whereby they can implement and deliver a class management solution.

The requirements :

• An effective class management solution
• Integrated Exam management and delivery solution.
• The solution should be integrated with their Active Directory.
• The teacher should be able to perform the below mentioned tasks on the student’s screen.
• Have a real-time visibility of student screen.
• Control student screen.
• Draw and write on the students’ screen.
• Give stars/appreciation to the student depending on their performance.
• Convey message over chat or audio to individual students.
• Create, deliver, evaluate multiple chose question exam.
• Export results of the exam.
• Have a secured shared file location where the teacher can send and receive documents.
• Sending and receiving documents from an individual student during the class.
• Record the class.

Solution:

With proper research we were able to find out a software which is available in the market by the name of Net Control 2 Pro (Please click on the link here to checkout this amazing software). After thorough testing, we figured out that this is the most appropriate solution which satisfied all the customer needs with some additional cool features like whiteboard, broadcast etc

 

The Whiteboard feature allowed the teacher to open a whiteboard on his screen and broadcast his screen for all the students to see. While the teacher would write/draw on his screen, the students are able to see the inputs in real time.

The customer actually liked the solution but now we had to figure out a way to deliver this in the most efficient and fast manner. During the presales process, we concluded that VDI is the best way to more on with delivering this solution to the customer.

Now that’s where my skillset comes into the picture.

A POC of delivering this class management solution on top of VMware Horizon was agreed with the customer.

Primarily,  we focused on keeping the architecture simple for the customer to see the magic of delivering application and desktops with VMware Horizon.

POC:

Use cases:

•      VDI for teachers to be delivered over laptop, computer and Samsung Tablets. 
•      VDI for students to be delivered over laptop, computer and Samsung Tablets.

 

This amazing experience started with choosing the students and teachers and subject for the POC.

After we had the list of all the stakeholders, we started adding them to the AD security group which we created for the purpose of this POC.

Then began the installation and integration of various VMware Horizon components.

For minimal management, we used two R640 servers as hosts with one vCenter. Also, we created just one connection server, two golden images (one in English and the other one in Arabic).

The connection was simple too. The physical servers, computers and the access points were connected to the same Switch. After establishing the proper connectivity, we were able to deliver a successful training class with 25 students and 1 teacher. The same class was delivered where some students were using computer, other were using tablets. The teacher was transitioning between the computer and a tablets. We tested almost all the features and it was totally an amazing experience.

The credit of delivering the class management solution with such a smooth and easy fashion was explicitly captured by VMware Horizon. A setup which would have taken us 3-4 days, was delivered in 3-4 hours. 

 

Net Control 2 Pro  : https://www.netcontrol2.com/pro

 

 

CPU vs GPU

 

 CPU vs GPU

How are they different?

In this blog post, although the discussion will revolve around the differences between CPU and GPU, however we should know that CPU can never be fully replaced by a GPU. 

A GPU complements CPU architecture by allowing repetitive calculations within an application to be run in parallel while the main program continues to run on the CPU. 

CPU architecture:

For the sake of explanation, let’s take one CPU core into consideration.

What we notice is that, we have layer-1 cache for data and instruction which is dedicated per core.

We also have a dedicated layer-2 cache . Depending on the make & model, it can be up to 2 mb in size which is actually a good size for the cache.

Last layer cache is the layer-3 cache which is shared among all the core within the CPU package.

The process of fetching the data starts from layer-1 cache. If the data is not present in layer-1, it will start looking into layer-2 cache. If the data is not present in layer-2, it will then start looking into layer-3 cache. In case the data is not present in any cache layer, it will then talk to the memory controller which is connected to the actual global memory - DRAM.

So, CPU architecture is about quick memory access and performing calculation is a sequential way.

However, when we are talking about  ML /AI where computation need to be performed on much larger datasets, we need throughput and parallelism. Taking this into account, CPU alone is not the perfect choice to achieve that.

Another important thing to be noted here is that the process is scheduled per core in case of CPU.

GPU architecture:

When we take a look at the GPU architecture we find that the GPU architecture is based on many processing clusters. Within these processing clusters, we have streaming multiprocessors and that is where the cores reside.

The important thing to notice here is that a GPU consists of multiple processing clusters. A common GPU consists of 30-40 processing clusters. And then, a single processing cluster can have multiple streaming processing clusters

When the GPU performs computation on a large dataset, it is scheduled on the Processing Cluster and not the Core. It will then go ahead and schedule it on multiple Streaming Multiprocessors. Since we have multiple cores in a single Streaming Multiprocessor, now we have lot of cores doing computation which make good throughput possible. 

This architecture makes it possible to achieve parallelism and thereby, provides amazingly good throughput.