VDI In Action
b2Lateral has helped a number of organisations plan, design and implement VDI solutions into their businesses, two examples of which we would like to share with you demonstrating both server and laptop based solutions.
Major Global Property Company
The first example is with a major global property company whose EMEA operation spans 134 offices, across 36 companies and 5,750 employees. Each year this organisation would replace a quarter of its user desktop hardware as part of continuous technology refresh. Not only did this generate a heavy annual capital investment, it also consumed many hours of IT resources to reconfigure new machines and re-image these.
This organisation also relied on a distributed server architecture with servers being placed in each of the regional offices. Not only did this have high network bandwidth overhead, but back-ups were inevitably unreliable and massive travel expenses were incurred for maintenance.
b2Lateral worked with this company to design and configure a centralised infrastructure to support a VDI solution. We helped specify the required hardware and connectivity and then architected a solution based on VMware’s suite of applications.
What is now in place is a data centre infrastructure based on Dell blade servers running VMware ESX 3.5 as the virtualisation platform, VMware Virtual Centre as the monitoring tool and VMware ACE as the virtual desktop.
During the process of installation and configuration of this infrastructure, b2Lateral also embarked on a knowledge transfer exercise ensuring that the organisation developed their skills in VDI and in particular the components utilised so as to become self sufficient in rolling out and managing this solution.
As they rolled out the VDI solution to the desktop, this organisation is already realising some of the benefits, on top of the massive savings on desktop refresh expenditure, they have reduced network bandwidth requirements and reduced desktop management overhead.
Major Technology & Entertainment Company
The second example is totally different. This global manufacturer of audio, video, communication and IT technologies wanted their sales force to be able to demonstrate their latest Blue Ray technology on their laptops, however, this was only possible under Microsoft Vista. The challenge they faced is that their standard corporate laptop build was based on Microsoft XP and this was not possible to change.
Faced with the issue of having to provide their sales force with two laptops they consulted with b2Lateral around an alternative of utilising VDI on these laptops to enable a dual environment. The solution saw laptops being provided built with Microsoft Vista to support the Blue Ray technology, but also on these machines was placed VMware ACE to enable these machines to run Microsoft XP as a virtual machine.
b2Lateral assisted with the design, architecture, implementation and configuration of this solution that has been successfully piloted within the marketing team and is now being rolled out to the sales force.
The organisation has avoided the cost of providing additional laptops to its sales force and the sales people themselves have an effective single laptop solution that allows them to demonstrate the Blue Ray technology while also retaining full corporate desktop capabilities.