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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 cluster 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 UW Seattle students (including RSOs), instructors and faculty. Any students and instructors registered in an Engineering course for the current quarter will have access to Engineering specific software. There is also a separate resource pool for all UW Seattle students and faculty as resources allow. Due to software licensing the ENGR pools are 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 UW. The hardware assigned varies on the pool used.

ENGR - 8 vCPUs from an AMD EPYC™ 9354 processor, and 24GB of RAM.

ENGR-GPU - 8 vCPUs from an AMD EPYC™ 9354 processor, 24GB of RAM, and access to an NVIDIA L40S GPU with 2 or 3GB of VRAM as depending usage for the quarter.

ENGR-HIRES - 16 vCPUs from an AMD EPYC™ 9354 processor, 32GB of RAM, and access to an NVIDIA L40S GPU with 6GB of VRAM. This pool is more designed for students engaged in capstone projects and its availability is based on if extra resources can be pulled from the ENGR-GPU pool.

UW - 4 vCPUs from an AMD EPYC™ 9354 processor and 12GB of RAM.

How often is COE-VDI updated?
VDI pools are typically updated on the second Tuesday of the month with software requests, security updates or minor tweaks to the pools. Major updates such as yearly releases of products are typically installed over summer quarter.

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.

How to request access
Engineering pool access is enabled by default for students and instructors enrolled in a engineering affiliated course for the current quarter. UW pool access is enabled for all instructors and students at the UW Seattle campus. An RSO can also request access on a quarterly basis but will need to contact the help desk in the link below

Faculty or students needing access may need to contact the COE-VDI help desk (you must use a UW or Gmail email address).