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Schoolyear AVD

Overview

This chapter describes how the Schoolyear AVD Add-on works. It is one of the three components required to make the Schoolyear AVD Solution work. You can read more about the other two components in other chapters.

The Schoolyear AVD add-on consists of the following SaaS services:

  • the Scheduling Tool, a user-friendly interface within the Settings Widget that is integrated into the Assessment Platform and LMS quizzes. It allows users to activate applications (your images) for pre-planned exams and automatically manages the scheduling and reservation of required cloud resources

  • the Exam Orchestrator is a system that runs in the background and, based on the exam schedule, automatically executes deployments and deletions in your Azure tenant

  • the Monitoring dashboard tracks the Exam Orchestrator, provides a detailed overview of all deployments and their logs and notifies you of any problems

  • the AVD Add-on Configurator is the section within your Schoolyear tenant’s admin console where you connect your Azure subscription to Safe Exam Workspace and configure all settings for the AVD add-on

and the following software components:

  • the Schoolyear VDI Browser is a lock-down browser that runs within your Azure Virtual Desktop. It automatically launches the assessment platform or LMS quizzes, and permits access to additional whitelisted websites and files as specified by users through the Settings Widget

  • the Trusted Proxy enforces endpoint security within your AVD infrastructure to prevent students from accessing the VDI outside the Safe Exam Workspace

  • the Sessionhost Proxy that filters network traffic coming from the VM during the exam

The SaaS services are hosted and managed by Schoolyear. The software components are maintained by Schoolyear, but are hosted by yourself.

Open-Source

Notable exceptions from the list of components above are the open-source tools and resources Schoolyear publishes to aid you in setting up your own AVD implementation. These tools and resources are not part of the Schoolyear AVD Add-on and, although they are useful, they are not required.

These open-source tools include:

  • The example images and deployment templates
  • The AVD-CLI tool for building and deploying images in Azure
  • The trusted proxy installation script