Trinity College Overcomes Login Boot Storms Using Liquidware ProfileUnity
Founded in 1888, Trinity College in Colac, Victoria, Australia, provides junior, middle and senior school curricula to students completing secondary education years 7 through 12. Students attend classes in modern, well-resourced computer learning labs. Trinity College was a very early adopter of virtual desktops to equip its students with access to coursework and resources outside the classroom as well as to optimize learning during scheduled class periods. However, in earlier implementations, the college almost immediately had problems with its combination of roaming profiles, folder redirection, the RDP protocol and the impact of virtual desktops on storage IOPS. This blending of technologies created the perfect "boot storm" when students tried to log on to workspaces en masse at the beginning of each class period. Logins were up to 5 minutes in most cases -- clearly unacceptable levels that cut into class periods.
Trinity staff applied a wholesale upgrade of its virtual desktops to move to PCoIP, expanded storage resources, moved from persistent to non-persistent stateless desktops. One reason this could be accomplished was that the college also incorporated ProfileUnity into its architecture. ProfileUnity eliminated the need for roaming profiles and folder redirection. The solution also paved the way for an automated migration from Windows XP machines to Windows 7. As a result, login times were reduced to under 45 seconds, and boot storms were a thing of the past.
As a bonus, the college was also able to leverage printer management within ProfileUnity, ensuring that students had access to appropriate printers based on their profiles, curricula and locations. Missing printer assignments were the number one cause of IT helpdesk calls. With ProfileUnity, all users' printer preferences are assigned in a portability setting that follows them so printers are always locked and loaded, saving the IT staff considerable time.
Another bonus for Trinity was that staff was able to leverage FlexApp application layering to deliver applications to students on demand based on their user preferences, so the number of master desktop images that must be set up and managed has been significantly reduced. FlexApp integrates seamlessly with ProfileUnity User Environment Management, so administrators can pinpoint the delivery of applications to users based on preferences and rights management.
