What is it?
The EECS VMware infrastructure is a collection of powerful compute servers which collectively run many of our production services, including homework.eecs.tufts.edu and the majority of our Windows environment.
What purpose does it serve?
Our VMware environment houses several different VMware tools and resources, some of which are accessible to students upon special request. Two of these accessible tools are vCenter/vSphere and Horizon. You may submit special requests by emailing staff@eecs.tufts.edu.
What is vCenter/vSphere?
The EECS VMware vCenter is a collection of large computing hosts which are used to create, run, and maintain virtual desktops. A single host can be running between 5 and 30 VMs (respectively) at a given time. vCenter is a means to manage and monitor the infrastructure from a single point/computer.
What is VMware Horizon?
VMware Horizon is a tool designed to allow users remote access to either full desktop virtual machines, or simply just applications, from a variety of different systems including cell phones and tablet. You may learn more about VMware Horizon on this page.
So, what’s in it for me, an EECS student?
The EECS staff are happy to provide students with their own, personal VMs on a request-by-request basis. If you are an EECS student and you need a very specific setup for your machine, or you need a specific piece of software but don’t have a machine that can handle it, you may request to have your own VM built to your specificity.
Or, if you so choose, we can give you a portion of our VMware environment’s resources to play around with to your liking (CPUs, RAM, Hard Drive Space, etc). You will be given what’s closely resembles console access, so as if you’re sitting in front of the machine and can access the bios.
Please email staff@eecs.tufts.edu with any questions/inquiries.
Okay, I got what I need, how do I access it?
No Console Access:
The EECS staff only support RedHat Enterprise Linux and Microsoft Windows operating systems. Depending on what you requested, you may simply be able to ssh or Remote Desktop into the VM that you asked to be created. For instructions on that, please refer to the “Remote Access” menu of this website. For very specific cases, we may be able to setup a VMware Horizon-accessible machine for you.
Console Access:
If you requested a machine that has an unsupported operating system, such as Debian or Ubuntu, you most likely will want console access. Please follow the steps on this page for accessing your VM through the vCenter Remote Console tool.
Creating Your Own:
If you were given permission to create your own VM, please follow the guide on this page to walk you through the process.