East Surrey College virtualises its desktop infrastructure

The College VDI infrastructure, replaces its ageing student and staff desktop estate, and is scalable, resilient and secure - delivering reliable services - with no performance bottlenecks. The business continuity and disaster recovery capabilities of the HP hardware and VSphere environment, protect desktop data and ensure continuous availability for College end-users. This has also led to a decrease in support calls and reduced end-user downtime to improve overall workplace productivity.

Richard Allan, ICT Operational Manager at East Surrey College said, “CSA Waverley impressed us with their technical expertise, effective planning and detail which ensured that the project delivery was a very positive experience for us. They have designed and implemented a flexible, highly available and cost effective VDI environment for us, which is resulting in reduced power costs, so the cost of IT ownership has dramatically reduced.”

The new infrastructure
The VDI solution consists of a VMware ESXi cluster running VMware View virtual desktops. Within the VDI, ‘non-persistent’ desktop pools are configured that create and delete desktops, on demand, as users log in and out. This means that patches and upgrades are more easily applied to a single image in a resource pool of virtual desktops - which also reduces IT management time.

Users can flexibly connect to their View desktop from a variety of devices including desktops, thin or zero clients, and mobile devices. Existing PCs were re-purposed as thin clients using DevonIT’s VDI Blaster software. This converted the College’s enterprise PCs into secure, centrally managed desktop appliances.

The Virtual desktop security is provided by Trend Deep which allows the virtual desktop sessions to be protected on creation and virus definitions are centralised to eliminate desktop virus update storms. This protects the College’s mission-critical enterprise applications and data from breaches and business disruptions - without expensive emergency patching.

To build the supporting infrastructure, CSA Waverley employed three HP Proliant DL380 Generation 8 servers with VSphere5 and VMware View 5.1 installed. To create the SAN, HP P4500 G2 14.4TB SAS Virtualisation technology was implemented as shared storage for the cluster, accessed via a dedicated iSCSI Network, running over a pair of Procurve 2910-AL switches. Using the 2 P4000 SAN storage nodes in the Virtualisation SAN bundle, a cluster was created that aggregates all of the critical components of every storage node to determine the SAN cluster’s total performance and capacity.
The host servers connected to the SAN, access the disk as if it was local to the system via iSCSI. The Storage clusters are also easily scalable - without any downtime. The P4000 offers VMware VAAI integration and allows for VMs to be deployed in 85% less time with a simultaneous SAN traffic reduction of 94% - this was key when deploying a ‘non-persistent’ desktop environment for the College.