Liquidware Labs Solutions Helps City of Tempe Migrate Windows 7 Desktops To VMware VDI
The City of Tempe, Arizona, has approximately 1,800 PC users across all its departments – all of whom needed to be migrated from Windows XP to Windows 7 before support ended for the legacy operating system. In addition, most users were overdue, or soon would be, for a computer upgrade. This combination of factors had the IT team concerned that its ability to support users would be strained, so improving desktop management also became a critical goal for the upgrade project. The team had virtualization experience on the server side and felt comfortable moving forward with a desktop virtualization pilot.
Confronting myriad challenges during the pilot, the City of Tempe turned to IT Partners, who recommended Liquidware Labs solutions. The first step was a Stratusphere FIT assessment. Stratusphere FIT presents assessment metrics of the legacy physical desktops, including users, machines, applications and storage, to admins to help them decide which users desktops can be virtualized and provides guidance on architecture design and resource capacity for optimal desktop performance. On learning that VMware’s ThinApp could not virtualize all apps needed by virtual desktop users, the team also turned to Liquidware’s FlexApp to handle application delivery through application layering. And for user-profile and environment management in its VMware Horizon environments, the City of Tempe used ProfileUnity in place of roaming profiles and other basic persona management tools. ProfileUnity decouple user profiles, settings, configuration and data from the operating system, and stores these securely to a network share in the data center. With ProfileUnity, login time is reduced to seconds and administrators benefit from highly granular control over users access to applications and other resources through policy management within the solution.
With Liquidware Labs solutions, the City of Tempe IT staff found that managing virtual desktops was like night and day compared to the manual process and older technologies they were using before. Today they can manage and customize desktops at a really granular level that can't be matched with basic VMware profile tools or with roaming profiles.
