Guangxi University

Located in Nanning, Guangxi University is the largest comprehensive university in Guangxi Province, and the only university of Project 211 in Guangxi. Guangxi University is one of first batch of universities of "First-class disciplines of the world" initiative and incorporated into the Alliance of National Key Construction of "one province, one university" Universities in Mid-West China (Z14). There are 25 schools with about 40,000 students in total.

In September 2019, the Information Center and Network Center of Guangxi University jointly led the launch of the campus public server room cloud project. More than 10 technical experts were engaged in solving the management and O&M issues of the 20 computer classrooms in the university, and making a thorough cloud reformation to meet the requirements of courses and examinations using computers.

Requirements

1.    Simplify the management of traditional PC classrooms

At present, the public computer classrooms (20) of the university are used for the professional courses of secondary-level schools. Due to the large number of students and busy course tasks, the O&M management of the PC mode is extremely poor and inefficient.

2.    Resolve professional software conflicts

Professional software needs to be installed for each major, and the installation environments are different. As a result, component conflicts often occur and the software cannot be installed normally.

3.    Meet performance pressure requirements

It shall meet the concurrent use of 1700 points, and have a large amount of 3D software for teaching.

4.    Meet students' independent reservation requirements

As a public resource for routine teaching, computer classrooms can be reserved by students in the spare time. It needs to be provided with reservation, registration and management functions to improve the utilization of server rooms.

5.    Guarantee formal examination activities

In addition to the use of computers at ordinary times, server rooms shall also meet the requirements of international examinations, such as NCRE, CET 4 and CET 6, and final examinations using computers.

6.    Future office cloud

It can be managed or integrated into the large-scale construction of future cloud offices, and can be customized to a high degree. It can expand capacity horizontally and meet the use requirements in the next five years and subsequent reasonable development requirements.

H3C Desktop Cloud Solution

H3C solved the management and O&M issues of the computer classrooms of the university by using the Learningspace desktop cloud solution, and performed a thorough cloud reformation. The solutions include:

1.    VDI architecture and cloud-oriented reformation

The Learningspace solution replaces the traditional PC classroom for easy O&M management. The GPU can be turned into computing resource pools and vCPU/vGPU/memory/hard disk can be flexibly allocated.

2.    Infinite subdivision of course template

The Learningspace is delivered in the form of virtual machines. Different desktop environments are made for different professional courses and the related desktop environment is pushed according to the course template, resolving the flexible template switching and software conflict.

3.    Interconnecting with educational administration system of the university

Based on existing interconnection development experience, it interconnects with the educational administration system of the university, and combines with the independent reservation system customized and developed by the aggregator, fully meeting the requirements of automatic class starting and ending and self-reservation.

4.    Customization in large-scale scenarios

Through the acceleration of solid-state disk, development of batch interfaces, decomposition pressure of cluster, and optimization of VDP, the concurrent speed can be improved. According to the real measurement, when 800 points are simultaneously powered on, all desktops are available in 3 and half minutes.

5.    Customization in examination scenarios

The examination-specific mirroring, automated examination deployment requirements, and other customization functions in examination scenarios can improve the efficiency of environment implementation, and allow for traceability when the examination results are disputed.

6.    Desktop cloud solution package

It covers teaching and office scenarios, applies to computer classrooms, multimedia classrooms, offices, and administrative halls. It is under the unified management of one platform.

Results

1.    1686 student terminals C100X, 1686 sets of Learningspace management software, 458 sets of graphics card virtualization vGPU authorization, and 38 sets of virtualization software CAS.

2.   Engage in a wide range of comprehensive businesses such as general public courses, some professional courses, a large number of 3D design courses, language courses, CET 4 and CET 6, and college entrance examination scoring.

3.    Interconnect with educational administration system of the university, automatically start and end the class of the public server room according to the class schedule time, and reduce the error rate of the course selected by the teacher.

4.    Associate with the independent reservation system to ensure that students can reserve idle hours of computers, classrooms and seats, reasonably arrange their free time, supporting data statistics and analysis.

5.    Large-scale 3D courses, including ArcGIS, Adobe series, ENVI, Altium Designer, 3Dmax, C4D, PLAXIS3D, UG and other professional applications.

6.    Build a campus space platform to remove the physical and information silo of the traditional PC room. The new platform realizes account roaming, data following, and seamless continuation of teaching and self-learning progress.

7.    Build a campus cloud disk, provide teachers and students with private storage space to keep personal files permanently during the academic years, and share data without limits to ensure the interaction of teachers and students anywhere at any time rather than just in physical classrooms.