Dell EMC VDI helps university expand application access

'A vision we were aligned with'

The university chose Dell R630 servers for their high density; one rack hosts 1,000 desktops and up to 2,000 applications. And for students in the schools of architecture and engineering that needed graphics-heavy apps, for example, the R730 servers allowed the virtual desktops to support GPUs. (Plus, at the same time as the Dell EMC VDI project, the university moved many of its devices from Windows 7 to Windows 10, which tends to require more graphics processing on basic applications.)

"We wanted to have the most rich experience and allow everyone on campus to be able to use [VDI], so that meant we needed to cover everybody," said Jon C. Kelley, associate director of enterprise systems at the university. "Having a GPU for literally every desktop helped with even the base-level stuff on Windows 10."

Before choosing Dell EMC VDI services, the team had looked at Hewlett Packard Enterprise for infrastructure and Citrix for VDI software. But IT staff members were already familiar with Dell, and they felt more attracted to Dell EMC's philosophy, which pushed the commoditization of hardware and the value of software abstraction, Kelley said.

In addition, VMware's vision of simplified desktop delivery with major end-user visibility, using its NSX and vRealize Suite products for cloud infrastructure management, resonated with IT, he said.

"An individual having data and needing to manipulate that data using applications -- while wanting to have access to both, wherever you are -- was a vision we were aligned with," he added.

A bundled approach to desktop virtualization and its back-end infrastructure can help organizations reduce complexity, said Rhett Dillingham, vice president and senior analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy.

"VDI has been one of the more complicated technologies to plan for and deliver at scale," he said. "To have a single vendor not just deliver but support that is key. The ability to call a single vendor and have them run triage and manage resolution of all issues … is a drastic simplification."

Teamwork made the dream work

To ensure that the Dell EMC VDI project went smoothly from planning to implementation, members of the university's communications, desktop support and IT infrastructure teams formed a group that met regularly.

"That was really crucial because we needed buy-in from desktop support," Kelley said. "A lot of those people were pretty resistant to the VDI concept. Getting them to understand, 'Oh, it frees up my time to do other things, and I also still have control over the imaging and things like that,' was really key."

The IT staff nailed down the overall architecture first, then deployed the thin clients, created a management cluster and used contractor services to help them deploy NSX. Lastly, they built the compute nodes, which store and run the memory, processing and other resources for the deployment's virtual machines, and added them to VMware Horizon to enable virtual desktop provisioning.

"The university IT team was really strong," said Andrew McDaniel, director of VDI Ready Solutions at Dell EMC. "They got deep into the deployment and took on responsibility for doing quite a bit of the work themselves."

The biggest challenge was figuring out how to organize billing for the on-demand access to software and services, because the university has a central IT department and several additional, distributed IT groups that support specific colleges and departments.

"When you're using Workspace One and deploying apps, there is no static number," Herzig said. "How do you bill for that?"

The university is experimenting with two models. With one, a group pays a specific fee per year per endpoint, and the central IT department provides and maintains the thin client and monitor, as well as covers back-end infrastructure and licensing costs. In the second, the group buys its own thin clients and monitors, which it is responsible for maintaining, and pays a reduced yearly fee per endpoint to cover infrastructure and licensing.

The Dell EMC VDI deployment was so successful that within only a couple months of deploying the first virtual desktops, the IT department amassed a long list of other groups at the university that wanted to implement them too. Herzig's team continuously works to deliver virtual desktops to more groups and plans to implement VDI for faculty desktops and student and faculty mobile devices.

"From day one in the labs, we have had virtually no complaints," Herzig said. "And typically if you've got 30 machines, you've got a couple that are down for one reason or another. Well, that problem is gone. The support people spend a lot less time fiddling with lab machines trying to bring them back up or solve problems or help users deal with connectivity issues or application issues."

As more organizations see how this type of bundled approach to VDI can be successful, they may be more willing to adopt the technology, Dillingham said.