Global Delivery of Large Scale VDIwith Quest and MicrosoftDaniel BoltonInformation ServicesKingston University

Mission Statement:To provide a University without walls

About Kingston University

23,000 Students – 1500 distance learning.

2500 Staff (excluding temporary staff and guests).

4 Campuses and multiple satellite offices.

7000 Desktops (Windows, OS X, Linux).

EST 1000+ Mobile devices (Smart phones, Laptops, Tablets).

Courses run all over the world, China, India, Russia, Greece, etc.

Multiple affiliate institutions.

Business Drivers

Original Business Drivers:

To provide “managed” services to mobile and “non-managed” users.

Service delivery for long distance learning students.

Reduce the complexity of the traditional desktop model.

Windows 7 Migration.

Business Drivers

Evolved Business Drivers:

Lower the total cost of ownership (where feasible).

Improve service continuity.

Technical Requirements

Location aware – Ability to assign “resources” based on location.

Support for, Windows, Mac and Linux clients.

User environment management.

Integration with Remote Desktop Services (terminal services).

Application Integration – MSI installs, Application Virtualization, etc.

Granular administration – Helpdesk roles, etc.

Connectivity over high latency connections.

Obstacles

User acceptance (at all levels).

Novell lingering on!

IP address allocation.

Applications.

User installed applications.

Identifying the different user types.

User Identification

User Type VDI VDI withRemoteFX

RDS Seamless Apps

Local Desktop

Knowledge Worker √ √Power User √ √ √ √ √Advanced User √ √ √ √ √

Our Choice

Quest vWorkspace

Microsoft Hyper-V

Microsoft App-V

Phase 1 – Initial Infrastructure

Designed to support 300 Windows 7 Desktops and 200 RDS sessions.

Utilize existing SAN infrastructure.

Virtual Desktops and RDS servers hosted on Hyper-V (managed by SCVMM).

No Desktop replacements – value added only

Infrastructure

What we are Achieving

Desktops as a Service (DaaS).

Centralised desktop management.

Dynamically assembled desktops.

Dynamically Assembled Desktops

User Data

User Profile

Applications

OS

Decisions For Moving Forward

Persistent desktop or non-persistent desktop?

Virtual machine storage, SAN or local disk?

User profiles – folder redirection? Registry capturing? Etc?

Virtualize RDS servers?

Use App-V’s shared cache feature?

Phase 2 – Goals

By the end of March 2011 we will (“should”) have the following;

Support for additional 2500 - 3000 virtual Windows 7 desktops.

Support for additional 1500 - 2000 Remote Desktop Services connections.

300 - 600 Windows 7 RemoteFX “ready” virtual desktops.

Applications streamed using App-V (with shared cache).

Started the next phase of our client hypervisor pilot with vWorkspace integration.

Phase 2 - Infrastructure

2 Additional vWorkspace connection brokers.

2 Additional vWorkspace web portals.

An additional vWorkspace user profile server for redundancy.

An additional MS SQL server for fault tolerance vWorkspace DB.

Utilize existing “intelligent” load balancing appliance for web portal connectivity and use to replace the SSL gateway.

Phase 2 - Infrastructure

50 Additional Hyper-v hosts each with, 12 CPU Cores 120GB Memory 10 146GB 15k SAS drives 4 Network ports 1GB GFX card

This gives us (per server), At least 40 Windows 7 virtual machines with 2GB RAM

60 virtual machines was achievable with acceptable performance 4 – 12 RemoteFX enabled virtual machines 20 RDS sessions

35 sessions with acceptable performance

Infrastructure

Advice

DO NOT RUSH INTO ANYTHING.

ONE SIZE DOES NOT FIT ALL.

IDENTIFY USER REQUIREMENTS.

VIRTUAL DESKTOPS ARE NOT VIRTUAL SERVERS!

YOU DO NOT HAVE TO USE THIN CLIENTS!

Quest and Microsoft

Working with Quest.

Working with Microsoft.

Q & maybe some A