UUH Scales & Optimizes Citrix Workspaces with FlexApp and ProfileUnity
University of Utah Health provides patient care for the people of Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, western Colorado and much of Nevada through five hospitals, twelve community health centers and numerous other clinics and virtual care services. More than 10,000 doctors, nurses, and other staff work on Citrix digital workspaces. However, because many of its clinical professionals need highly specialized applications, the efforts to move more clinicians to virtual desktops stalled. Many applications had been segregated onto their own dedicated servers, creating numerous siloes in a population of more than 1,500 servers. User needs and preferences for highly customized computers also led to desktop performance problems. As some user profiles approached 4-5 GB, the desktop would frequently fail to load or would crash when in use. UUH’s Support team typically had to resolve multiple desktop and profile issues, which accounted for approximately 80 percent of all service tickets.
When the organization planned to transition from on-premises Microsoft Office to Office 365, staff knew it had to make changes to its profile management process. That idea led to a proof-of-concept project for application layering with FlexApp from Liquidware, which turned out to be a transformative development for the UUH IT infrastructure and its support operations. FlexApp instantly delivers applications to physical or virtual desktop users running any Windows® OS desktop in Citrix, VMware Horizon, Microsoft AVD, Nutanix Frame, Amazon WorkSpaces, and other environments. It puts apps in object-based containers, so when users change platforms or log in from new devices or locations, their workspaces and apps are ready and waiting for them. It can isolate applications by type so that only approved software is delivered and visible to a specific user's published workspaces. With FlexApp, UUH has been able to virtualize more than forty applications, including nearly all of its most widely used. UUH has significantly reduced the number of master images it needs to build and support. It has also been able to consolidate and decommission servers, besides simplifying workspace management. Older servers have been retired, including some of the forty dedicated servers that previously hosted single applications. UUH uses FlexApp with Liquidware’s ProfileUnity, which adds application rights management features and has eliminated all the problems the organization had experienced managing user profile bloat.
Not only are profile-caused crashes now extremely rare, the improved profile management and application delivery enable extremely fast logins, meeting the expectations and gaining the appreciation of the medical staff. Overall, the success in profile management, application management and server consolidation has enabled UUH’s Citrix Support team to shift its focus from troubleshooting to enabling ongoing improvements. The effort to get more employees onto digital workspaces has regained momentum and IT staff is back on track to move more users to virtual workspaces.
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