Blade Watch

I was having an interesting chat with one of my CIO friends, he’s kicked off a virtual desktop project coupled with a few changes in IT policy, to transform his support costs and end user delivery. I was asking him about why he’s looking at a virtual desktop platform despite his comments “I’m getting rinsed on licenses…. But operationally it’s just easier and allows me to tidy up all the legacy issues… Switching to a combined virtual and physical desktop platform should pay for itself in a year or so.”

I wanted to rapidly improve delivery, reduce my operating costs and my desktop sprawl. When looking with the management team at our IT spend, our incidents logged, too much money/time was being spent on end user commodity issues:

• My pc is slow
• I need more disk space or memory on my pc
• I need my pc rebuilt – it’s slow or doesn’t work
• George is starting tomorrow, can we have a new pc, we forgot to tell you
• I need a loan pc for a work experience/intern/training, but there’s no budget, can IT loan me a pc for a month? – but this isn’t logged effectively or billed accordingly

When we looked there were some key issues:

• Desktops were all different platforms, ranging from ‘trader workstations, to different types of
• Compaq/Dell pcs, we had pcs switched off around the office, some of which were used for management, some covered by support contracts, others no, some with owners, some without.
• All the issues surrounding legacy desktops, hardware, application failures, operating system issues, as well as pcs not meeting application system requirments.
• Inflexible existing platform, it was taking too long to deploy a pc from the point of the request to it being on the users’ desk
• Numerous applications which were not packaged for easy delivery to the client
• Business specific desktop build requirements – each business unit had specific customizations – this was a semi manual process.
• Laptops could go months without getting their anti virus or Microsoft patches applied
• Too many users had more than one pc, they might have a laptop and a pc when it wasn’t necessary
• The process we put in place was agreed with the business teams to transform delivery.

It comprised some new technical solutions (virtual pc, packaging applications etc) as well as some new pre-defined and agreed support procedures and processes:

• Unified corporate desktop image with a separate customization job for each business unit simplifying build process
• A new legacy corporate desktop build – streamlined to support legacy desktops/laptops until they are rebuilt – this build only available for ‘legacy laptops/desktops’ and has no upgrade path, minimal drivers to get the system working and no support for new layered components, dot net/mdac etc.
• Unified management desktop image which is locked down with common utilities packaged and installed
• User has a choice between either laptop/virtual pc – legacy not supported and replaced automatically upon failure/ or if a call is logged and issue cannot be fixed in three hours or via a ’simple legacy rebuild’.
• One support matrix with pre-defined supported models and lifecycle. Laptops are to be replaced every two years.
• Improved energy efficiency, the thin clients use less power and we’ve implemented energy efficient procedures to power down the desktop
• Less incidents and more flexibility with the virtual machines – we can clone machines on demand, if a user is having an existing issue, we can simply give them a pre-provisioned image to rule out the client pc.
• Improved help desk call handling and reporting by changing the call CTI’s (category/type/item) with pre-defined workflows and tasks.
• Abstracted the user from the pc using active directory and more effective configuration, the user only gets the application their groups give them permission to, user data is automatically routed to shared departmental and user drives.
• On demand virtual pcs for temporary users can be created and allocated using an online request system – which obtains approval from their line manager and updates our inventory tool
• Desktop support procedures created to accommodate user requirements for memory/configuration for the new configuration
• Reduced hardware support costs with our service provider, they now only support whatever is covered by warranty – everything else with a hardware failure gets replaced or fixed internally – no more purchase requests for 10GB hard drive for a Pentium III desktop.
• New process for desktop ownership, all desktops must have an owner, this can be ‘finance’ or Mike from Accounts, but there must be a designated owner. If there isn’t it’s billed to IT and IT therefore can decommission or recycle it as appropriate.
• A desktop database owned by the asset team which logs when a pc is bought, it’s model type and ownership/billing information – for reporting, billing and support. Track the lifecycle of the pc for asset/security as well as support. We can then for example state all Dell Optiplex GX240 are out of support, and email their owners accordingly requesting they be replaced with a virtual pc or laptop as appropriate.
• Users with laptops do not get a virtual desktop unless there is business justification – this means majority are used on a daily business on site, and therefore get their security patches applied, anti virus updated and avoids the laptop maintenance/support overhead.

Related posts:

1. Some thoughts on the virtual desktop Computerworld Computerworld – Jeff Allison’s company is considering desktop virtualization,...
2. Some thoughts on on the desktop virtualization debate PCWorld Organizations are finding it hard to calculate the cost...
3. Virtual desktop – the support questions/issues to consider Virtual desktops remain a topic of interest for me in...
4. AppSense gets Gold award in Desktop Virtualization @ VMworld 2009 AppSense AppSense, the leading provider of user environment management solutions...
5. Desktop virtualization seminar Business Wire MENLO PARK, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Pano Logic®, the leader in...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.