The University of Southern California was looking for a way to give their students access to Mac specific applications whenever and wherever they needed them. Whatever they chose needed to allow for different kinds of clients to access the servers from both inside and outside the university network, since not all of their students had the same kind of machines or connected from the same place.
In order to use Aqua Connect Remote Desktop Services, they set up three servers for their 75 users. Each server was a Mid-2013 Mac Pro, with 2 x 3.06 GHz 6-core Xeon with 64 GB of memory running Mac OS X 10.8 Server software. They also implemented two load balancer servers, which were installed on 2.5 GHz i5 Mac mini servers with 4 GB of memory. All of their client machines are using the Aqua Accelerated Protocol software clients in order to connect to their ACRDS servers. They currently are using ACRDS to provide access to iOS Developer Tools. They hope that video editing software will be the next major thing supported by Aqua Connect.
They see Aqua Connect as benefiting a larger user base in the future, specifically more classes that have a need for using Mac based applications. Their deployment of ACRDS is currently primarily aimed at enabling remote access to Mac-based applications for students who may not have the compatible technology or appropriate hardware platform. Additionally, ACRDS facilitates more flexible computing classroom scheduling as students could access Mac–based applications on their own computing devices or PC-based computing classrooms.
In addition to ACRDS, they are using Centrify products to help their implementation run smoother. They use Centrify for its Mac-based Group Policies and to manage AD authentication (SSO) for all of their Mac machines. Using the Centrify solution augmented with our own PowerShell scripts to manage AD group policies and security groups, they have a unified group security policy management for physical and virtual computing environments on both Mac and Windows platforms. Their
students enjoy single sign-on using university’s managed login credentials, persistent data storage as mapped drive and roaming user profile both in physical computing labs with Macs and PCs, as well as virtual computing labs with ACRDS and Windows Server RDS. They would absolutely recommend using ACRDS and Centrify together. They would not be able to accomplish their integrated Mac/Windows computing environment along with unified group security policy management without Centrify.