Barking & Dagenham College Diagnoses Issues, Speeds Logins and VDI Performance with Liquidware Solutions
Implementing virtual desktops did not solve a key issue for Barking and Dagenham College (BDC). Extremely slow login times of almost 20 minutes plagued students and staff at BDC. The organization used Liquidware Stratusphere UX to diagnose and uncover the root cause of login-time issues and subsequently deployed ProfileUnity and FlexApp, which finally cut login times to a little over a minute. A Health Check conducted with Stratusphere UX revealed that the host-level systems were have difficulties retrieving and delivering user profiles, as students often logged in to different desktops around campus. BDC was trying to leverage roaming profiles to offload user profiles so they could deploy non-persistent, stateless virtual desktops but, even in the physical environment, roaming profiles was positively sabotaging class sessions on VDI with extremely long login times.
Once roaming profiles was confirmed to be the key issue, BDC turned to Liquidware to deploy their ProfileUnity User Environment Management solution to take over the handling of student profiles, and the long login times were reduced to a little over a minute. BDC did not stop optimization efforts there. They further leveraged FlexApp so students could install their own apps as needed outside of the standard desktop image that BDC deployed of a Win 7 OS with Firefox, Chrome, MS Office, Visual Studio, Adobe Creative Suite and Sage Line.
According to BDC staff, Liquidware solutions are essential to making virtual desktops practical and effective in a campus environment, allowing the organization to achieve anytime, anywhere desktops for their use.
