Whatcom Community College Reaps Major Benefits from Liquidware Stratusphere UX
Whatcom Community College in Bellingham, Washington,has run a heavily virtualized IT environment for years and approximately 60 percent of the campus desktops that serve the school’s more than 11,000 students are virtualized. Whatcom is committed to desktop virtualization because it gives students, faculty and staff a convenient way to access their desktops, applications and files remotely, which is a very popular feature. The IT department doesn’t want users to have to trade off the convenience of remote access for performance – its goal is for virtual desktops to run as well or better than physical models. That calls for proactive management and optimization.
Whatcom Community College runs zero client Windows virtual desktops in the VMware Horizon 7 environment. As the VDI expanded, there were more resource conflicts and, as a result, desktop performance declined,but system administrators had a difficult time determining the root cause of issues. They were using interfaces in vSphere, but weren’t getting the information they needed. The lack of visibility led Whatcom to add Liquidware’s Stratusphere UX to the environment to improve visibility and problem prevention.
Whatcom’s ability to manage proactively was put to the test when the school began migrating from Windows 7 to Windows 10. Whatcom began experiencing storage issues and there were also increases in problems related to virtual desktop CPUs, RAM and overall performance. Stratusphere UX helped Whatcom see why when data indicated that the Windows 10 desktops were more resource heavy than Windows 7. They also put a lot of unexpected traffic on the network.
With Stratusphere UX, the college IT staff has gone from reacting to phone calls and fixing things to being preventative, providing an excellent troubleshooting solution for them as well as helping in proactive informed decision making on the course of their VDI.
