about virtual desktop infrastructure ... Ransom Everglades School simplifies desktop management, improves security and .
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why VDI? Ransom Everglades School simplifies desktop management, improves security and reduces costs with virtual desktop infrastructure.
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o one could accuse the IT staff of the Ransom Everglades School, in Coconut Grove, Fla., of not doing its homework about virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). Director of Information Technology Jeffrey Castillo and his team researched the technology over several years before deciding VDI was the best way to deliver computing resources to the school’s users. So when Ransom Everglades rolled out a Citrix XenDesktop-based VDI deployment for the 2012-13 school year, the results were no surprise. “It’s been a win for everyone – staff, students, administration and IT,” Castillo says. “We’re responsible for delivering
technology that is reliable, secure, fast and easy to operate, and to do that as cost-effectively as possible. VDI covers all of those concerns.” Ransom Everglades is an independent school with approximately 1,072 students in 6th through 12th grades, divided into a middle and a high school on separate campuses. Founded more than a century ago, Ransom Everglades is a venerable South Florida institution, but maintains academic excellence in part by providing the up-to-date technology tools students and faculty need. There are several computer labs on each campus, as well as permanent workstations in classrooms and notebook carts. The school had run a small pilot using Citrix Presentation Server about five years ago but delayed making a large investment in VDI technology. By 2010, however, Ransom Everglades was looking for a way to stretch its IT budget while adding new services and it was time to make the leap, says Castillo. Once Ransom Everglades administrators had given the go-ahead
for the VDI project, the IT staff reached out to Citrix for information on the manufacturer’s latest desktop virtualization systems and, as part of due diligence, solicited feedback from Citrix customers, says Castillo. The school also looked for some help and advice in putting the system together and turned to CDW• G.
Choose Components Carefully “When we undertake a project like this, we compare different potential partners. CDW• G was the correct one for us because of their knowledge of the technology — and they offered the best prices,” Castillo says. “They were there with us every step of the way. There were occasional glitches, but what CDW•G did on the project was priceless.” In a VDI solution, computing resources are virtualized and centralized in the data center, with none residing on endpoint devices. Users access data and applications through thin or zero client hardware, which essentially consists of a user interface and I/O tools for messaging to the
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CDWG.com | 800.808.4239 Jeffrey Castillo, Director of Information Technology, Ransom Everglades School, Coconut Grove, Fla.
data center where processing occurs. In addition to desktop virtualization software and client hardware, optimized networks and high-availability storage are essential elements of VDI systems. The key to successful VDI deployments is choosing those components that will make up the infrastructure carefully, says David Johnson, senior analyst at Forrester Research. “Organizations fail by not matching their current use cases to the technology closely enough and by not thinking of their future needs,” Johnson says. “By not doing enough planning, they impose artificial limits on what the technology investment can do for them now and later.” In addition to evaluating features and specifications, the Ransom Everglades IT staff wanted to put together a VDI system that was easy to deploy and manage, and that would provide an invisible transition from the old computing environment for users, says Castillo. CDW• G
provided a test environment in which Ransom Everglades tried out different technologies and different combinations of products for the infrastructure, thereby providing invaluable information during the decision-making process, he adds. In 2011, Ransom Everglades purchased an initial 200-seat license of Citrix XenDesktop, which became the heart of the school’s VDI solution. Along with the desktop virtualization software, Ransom Everglades implemented Citrix XenServer, Citrix XenApp and the Citrix NetScaler appliance. XenDesktop turns Windows desktops and applications into a virtualized on-demand service that can be delivered to any device. XenServer is a managed server virtualization platform which facilitates data center automation, while XenApp is an ondemand application delivery solution that allows apps to be managed in the data center and provided to users as a service. NetScaler accelerates delivery and optimizes the performance
of web-based applications for remote access connections.
Extended Resources and Redundancy With a wide range of tools and configuration options, XenDesktop makes it possible to provide a variety of customized use cases simultaneously. The system can deliver any Windows, web or software-as-a-service (SaaS) application and offers a high level of personalization for individual users, while retaining the streamlined central management capabilities inherent in VDI. The solution also supports almost any endpoint device and provides remote access to desktops, applications and data, secured by a built-in Secure Sockets Layer virtual private network (SSL VPN). Remote access was a particularly important consideration at Ransom Everglades, says Castillo. “We were looking for a way to extend network resources beyond the school for teachers and eventually for some selected students,” he says. “We
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Client Virtualization
also needed a system that worked on multiple OSs [operating systems] and even smartphones and tablets, as well as the thin client hardware in the schools.” At the suggestion of CDW•G specialists, Ransom Everglades selected HP ProLiant DL380 physical servers on which to run the software and virtual machines, and chose NetApp Disk Shelves with (24) 600GB 15k RPM SAS hard drives to create a storage area network (SAN) for the desktop images and individual user profiles. The final hardware piece of the VDI deployment was a network upgrade with Cisco Nexus 5548 Switches. For the sake of reliability and disaster recovery, Ransom Everglades actually created two VDI systems running in separate data centers at the high school and the middle school, though they operate under a single computer domain, says Castillo. Each data center has its own NetApp Disk Shelf, Citrix NetScaler and Nexus 5548 Switch. Three ProLiant servers were purchased for the high school data center, and two were placed in the middle school. “The goal was to achieve redundancy by providing each school with its own independent hardware infrastructure while, at the same time, enabling failover capabilities for keeping servers and applications online in the event of an outage at one of the sites,” says Castillo. As user hardware, Ransom Everglades selected Wyse Xenith Zero Clients, equipped with Citrix HDX technology, which optimizes the user experiences even over high-latency, low-bandwidth connections. The devices are designed to be configured automatically by XenDesktop and draw less than seven watts of power in full operation. With no hard drive or other moving parts, thin client devices last longer and have fewer maintenance issues than desktops and notebooks. When a thin or zero client does fail, replacement is easier and less expensive than is the case with fully configured devices. Castillo estimates that the move to VDI will extend the Ransom Everglades refresh cycle for personal
computing devices from three or four years to as many as seven years.
Lots of Moving Parts The installation and rollout of the VDI network at Ransom Everglades took time and meticulous preparation, but went off smoothly, says Network Administrator Eddie Palau. Deployment of the VDI is complicated by the need to set all the parameters to the particular environment, says Palau, but the process is manageable if the IT team takes the time to consult with experts and colleagues who are VDI veterans. “When you go into a VDI deployment from scratch, as we did, there are lots of moving parts,” he says. “There was hardware in the form of new servers, and then we were going into a new realm with the SAN because we didn’t have one previously. And that’s on top of the Citrix environment, which can be complex in itself. We consulted with a lot of people and we took it slowly.” However, once the VDI is in place, the simplicity it brings to managing desktops more than makes up for its deployment. The Xenith Zero Clients are automatically configured in five to 10 minutes by XenDesktop, in contrast to the three to four hours necessary to configure a PC in the school’s old computing environment, says Castillo. Keeping up with changes in standard utilities such as Adobe Reader and Flash Player, which frequently issues new versions, becomes a simple matter of upgrading the master image, adds Palau. “We just make the change and hit the update button and users have it instantly the next time they reboot – that’s worth a lot in terms of our time,” he says. For users, the move to VDI has, fortunately, had almost no impact, says Director of Studies John King. “Faculty, and even the tech-savvy students, have no idea how thin clients work or that we have changed to a different computing model, and that’s a good thing,” he says. “It’s exactly what you want — to manage resources better
and not have people notice because there have been no disruptions.” One reason for the smooth transition for users is that, unlike the clientserver computing model from which it evolved, VDI assigns each user an individual virtual desktop OS, says Brett Waldman, research manager at IDC. In the older technology, users shared operating systems sessions, sometimes interrupting or slowing their work to a crawl. “With VDI, each user has his or her own virtual machine and operating system,” Waldman says. “That translates into much more customization for individual users and a much better user experience.”
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CDWG.com | 800.808.4239
Security: Strengthened and Simplified Most organizations that move to VDI find that their data and networks are more secure than they have ever been, says Chris Wolf, a research vice president at Gartner Inc. “All your data stays securely in the data center – the data never really touches the VDI thin client hardware,” Wolf says. “If the thin client device is lost or stolen, it doesn’t really matter because it doesn’t connect to critical data. You just give the user a new thin client and the correct image.” VDI has “definitely” had a positive impact on information security at Ransom Everglades School, says Director of IT Jeffrey Castillo. “Viruses just don’t exist with VDI,” says Castillo. “The user is essentially seeing a read-only version of what’s in the data center. The system removes any malware in the registry because it doesn’t stay on the image.” Keeping up with security updates was previously a painstaking and time-consuming task that required the IT staff to install patches on individual devices, he says. “Now we can deploy patches on a moment’s notice and all our machines are covered.”
Return on Investment The Ransom Everglades VDI project cost the school approximately $250,000, says Castillo, but that price tag was bumped up by the school’s decision to build duplicate systems. The financial impact of the investment in the long term is all positive, however, as VDI makes the total cost of ownership of the desktop infrastructure much more predictable and will reduce the TCO over time, he says. VDI installations typically result in 10-25% TCO savings by three to five years after the initial investment, says Research Vice President Chris Wolf of Gartner Inc. “VDI produces savings in many ways,” he says. “The centralized management increases IT productivity, the endpoints require less maintenance and are less expensive to replace, and there are savings on power costs both from
In the same way, VDI allows Castillo and his team to assign group security policies that are automatically enforced because the images users see are centrally managed and controlled. Forrester Research Senior Analyst David Johnson cautions that although the centralized management of VDI improves security and presents “fewer ways for bad things to get into the data center,” organizations need to keep their guard up, especially with remote users. “The flexibility provided by VDI is great, but it requires a low latency, high bandwidth experience for users,” says Johnson. “Without 3G or 4G connections, users start looking for other ways to access data center resources and soon you have a hybrid environment that you haven’t prepared for.”
the virtualized data center and the low energy consumption of the thin clients. The barriers to VDI are usually cost and the complexity of the deployment. Once you’re over those hurdles, you recover the investment fairly quickly.” Financial considerations almost always matter to schools as they try to make the most of tight budgets, but the value of the VDI installation is really measured in the improved IT services it makes possible for
Ransom Everglades, says Castillo. VDI provides increased reliability, improves security by centralizing policy management and eliminating endpoint vulnerability to malware, saves energy and offers remote access to users. “We’d been watching VDI since it was a new technology,” Castillo says. “We always knew that when it matured it would change the way we run and maintain our system, and it has. It was a great fit for our needs.”
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