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COE-VDI

What is COE-VDI?
COE-VDI is a Virtualized Desktop Infrastructure. Using Omnissa Horizon software, it provides a flexible Windows desktop experience for students currently enrolled in the College of Engineering at the University of Washington Seattle Campus.

Each COE-VDI session is hosted on our Omnissa Horizon data center servers and provides the operating system and all necessary software as part of the desktop environment. Each session is created on-demand and provides a clean workstation environment for each user when they log on.

Who can use COE-VDI?
The virtualized desktop infrastructure engineering pool is currently available to students registered in an Engineering course for the current quarter. There is also a separate resource pool for all UW students and faculty as resources allow. Since the VDI cluster is funded via STF, it is restricted to educational use only. Research use is not allowed.

Why use COE-VDI?
COE-VDI allows COE Students to access a managed workstation like they may find in their department’s student computer labs. COE-VDI desktops can be accessed from anywhere using the Omnissa Horizon Client or COE-VDI webpage.

In addition to improved accessibility, COE-VDI can help give students access to university licensed software from anywhere, using any device with an Internet connection.

What are the hardware specs?
COE-VDI is composed of multiple Virtual Machine pools. The two main pools are ENGR-GPU and UWBasic. The hardware assigned varies on the pool used.

ENGR-GPU - 6 cores from an Xeon Gold 5120 or Silver 4216 processor, 16GB of RAM, and a NVIDIA M10 GPU.

UWBasic - 4 cores from an Xeon Gold 5120 or Silver 4216 processor and 8GB of RAM

Quick-Start Connect to COE-VDI
For more in-depth instructions, please see: Getting Started with COE-VDI.

COE-VDI may be accessed both on and off campus using various devices. Logging in with your UW NetID, you may access the COE-VDI VM pools by using either the Omnissa Horizon Client or the COE-VDI webpage.

If you are off campus, the Husky OnNet VPN must be connected and running in the background.

How to request access
Access is enabled by default for all College of Engineering students enrolled in a course for the current quarter. Faculty or students needing access may need to contact the COE-VDI help desk (you must use a UW or Gmail email address).