Interactive Data Center Digital Twin using Virtual Reality

Virtual Reality (VR) allows users to experience and interact with digital environments in an immersive way and, therewith, can provide a more intuitive way of interacting with computers using more natural human-machine interaction paradigms. Additionally, virtual environments can provide various advantages for data visualization, as the digital space is not constrained by real-world physical limitations. Furthermore, leveraging the third dimension and the spatial features, VR can be a viable alternative to traditional visualization. The goal of this thesis is the interaction and visualization paradigms to the realm of data centers by creating a server room as a digital twin using the Unity game engine. By integrating the live utilization metrics of a real High-Performance Computing (HPC) cluster into the virtual world, the VR server room can be used to analyze the current data and reason about its implications. This integration is done by incorporating the data into several places in the virtual environment. Following the creation of this digital twin, the application was evaluated against traditional, web-based data dashboards by conducting a user acceptance study. The results imply that the VR alternative improved the user experience and reduced the analysis complexity compared to the web version, concluding that VR can be a valuable addition to traditional metric visualization for the application of data center monitoring.