Student VDI now on Windows 10

Dear Students of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health,

The Department of Information Technology is pleased to announce that the Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) for students has been upgraded to the Windows 10 operating system.   VDI allows students to connect from their own computer to a virtual desktop PC  to access all of the instructional computing software dedicated to serving the dissertation, course work, and academic computing needs of students.

The upgrade of VDI from Windows 7 to Windows 10 is part of an ongoing project launched by the Department of Information Technology.

Why Windows 10?

  • Microsoft is ending supporting for Windows 7 in January 2020.
  • All PCs and virtual desktops need to be running Windows 10 by February 1st, 2020 to continue to receive security updates.

Reminders about VDI:

  • When using VDI at the Chan School, your print jobs can be sent to the onsite print release stations (where they remain available for 30 minutes)
  • When using VDI from home, your print jobs can either be sent to the onsite print release stations, OR to your locally installed printers (e.g. USB connected or Wi-Fi printers – though some models may not be recognized by VDI)
  • You should continue to save all work to your P: drive.
  • Idle sessions will be automatically disconnected after 15 minutes of inactivity

You will need to download and install a piece of software called “VMWare Horizon Client” in order to use VDI on your PC or Mac. Please visit the following website to obtain the download and find our instructions:

http://hsph.me/student-vdi

VDI for Staff will be upgraded this Fall.

Please contact our IT Helpdesk at (617) 432-4357 or email helpdesk@hsph.harvard.edu for any questions or concerns you may have regarding this information.

Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
Department of Information Technology