Case Study: Oregon State University achieves sub-minute VDI logins and scalable, cost-effective virtual labs with VMware vSAN

Oregon State University Enriches Educational Opportunities with Vmware Solutions

Oregon State University’s College of Business needed to scale its computer labs and support new, demanding classroom tools (including data analytics and distance learning) on a tight IT budget. Aging SAN storage and VDI workloads caused severe latency, login delays of up to 20 minutes, and recomposition times longer than 10 hours, so the university selected VMware Horizon and VMware vSAN to virtualize desktops and storage.

Using VMware Horizon delivered on a seven‑node VMware vSAN cluster (with NVIDIA GRID vGPUs and zero‑client endpoints), OSU cut lab login times from 20 minutes to about 1 minute, reduced recomposition to under 2 hours, and now supports up to 190 concurrent users—while lowering capital costs (about two‑thirds saved versus a new SAN and a reported 75% reduction in hardware acquisition costs). VMware vSAN also gave the college a simple, scalable path to increase capacity and performance by adding servers or SSDs.

Oregon State University

Alan Sprague

Senior System Administrator, College of Business