The stakes have never been  higher for keeping applications and business up and running.

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Gardner: Why were virtual desktops such an important direction for you? Why did it make sense for your organization?

Karbginski: In our organization, we’re talking about 580 travel agencies all over the country,    all over Germany, with 2,300 physical desktops, which were not in our    control. We had life cycles out there of about 4 or 5 years. We had  old   PCs with no client backups.

The    biggest reason is that recovery times at our workplace were 24 hours    between hardware change and bringing back all the software    configuration, etc. Desktop virtualization was a chance to get the    desktops into our data center, to get the security, and to get the controls.

DER  in Germany   is the number one in travel agencies. As I said, we're  talking about   580 branches. We’re operating as a leisure travel agency  with our   branches, Atlasreisen and DER, and also, in the business travel sector with FCm Travel Solutions.

IT-intensive business

Gardner: This is a very IT-intensive business now. Everything in travel is done though networked applications and cloud and software-as-a-service (SaaS) services. So a very intensive IT activity in each of these branches?

Karbginski: That’s right. Without the reservation systems, we can’t do any flight    bookings or reservations or check hotel availability. So without IT,  we   can do nothing.

Gardner: And tell me about the problem you  needed to solve. You had four  generations of PCs.  You couldn’t control them. It  took a lot of time  to recover if there was  a failure, and there was a  lot of different  software that you had to  support.

Karbginski: Yes. We had no domain integration no  control and we had those  crashes,  for example. All the data would be  gone. We had no backups  out there.  And  we changed the desktops about  every four or five  years. For  example, when the reservation system  needed more memory, we  had to buy  the memory, service providers were  going out there, and  everything was  done during business hours.

We now have  nearly about 100 percent virtualization. ... So it's about 99 percent  virtualization. ... So the data is under our control in the data    center, and important company information is not left in an office out    there. Security is a big thing.

Gardner: What were some of the things that you had to do in   order to enable this to work properly?

Karbginski: There   were some challenges during the rollout. The bandwidth was a  big thing.   Our service provider had to work very hard for us, because  we needed   more bandwidth out there. The path we had our offices was 1  or 2-Mbit   links to the headquarters data center. With desktop  virtualization, we   need a little bit more, depending on the number of  the workplaces and we   needed better quality of the lines.

So bandwidth was one thing. We also had the network infrastructure. We found some 10-Mbit half-duplex switches. So we had to change it. And we also had some hardware    problems. We had a special multi-card board for payment to read out    passports or to read out credit card information. They were very old and    connected with PS/2.

Fixed a lot of problems

So    there were a lot of problems, and we fixed them all. We changed the    switches. Our service provider for Internet VPN connection brought us    more quality. And we changed the keyboards. We don’t need this old  stuff   anymore.

Gardner: How has this worked out in  terms of  productivity, energy savings, lowering costs, and even  business  benefits?

Karbginski: Saving was our big thing  in planning  this project. The desktops have  been running out there now  about one  year, and we know that we have up  to 80 percent energy  saving, just from  changing the hardware out  there. We’re running the Wyse P20 Zero Client instead of physical PC hardware.

We needed more energy for the server side in the data center, but if    you look at it, we have 60 up to 70 percent energy savings overall. I    think it’s really great.

Gardner: That’s very good. So   what else comes in terms of productivity?

Karbginski: In the past, the updates came during the business hours. Now, we can   do  all software updates at nights or at the weekends or if the office   is  closed. So helpdesk cost is reduced about 50 percent.

... We're using Dell servers with two sockets, quad-core, 144-gigabyte RAM. We're also using EMC Clariion SAN with 25 terabytes. Network infrastructure is Cisco, based on 10 GB Nexus data center switches. At the beginning the project, we had View 4.0 and we upgraded it last month to 4.6.

The people side

Gardner: What were some of the challenges in terms of working this through the    people side of the process? We've talked about process, we've talked    technology, but was there a learning curve or an education process for    getting other people in your IT department as well as the users to    adjust to this?

Karbginski: There  were some unknown   challenges or some new challenges we had during the  rollout. For   example, the network team. The most important thing was  understanding of   virtualization. It's an enterprise environment now,  and if someone,  for  example, restarts the firewall in the data center, the desktops in our offices were disconnected.

It's really important to inform the other departments and also your own help desk.

...  The first thing that the end users told us was that the selling    platform from Amadeus, the reservation system, runs much faster now.    This was the first thing most of the end users told us, and that’s a    good thing.

The next is that the desktop follows the user. If the    user works in one office now and next week in another office, he gets    the same desktop. If the user is at the headquarters, he can use the    same desktop, same outlook, and same configuration. So desktop follows    the user now. This works really great.

Gardner: Looking to the future, are you going to be doing this following-the-user capability to more devices, perhaps mobile devices or at home PCs?

Karbginski: We plan to implement the security gateway with PCoIP support for home  office users or mobile users who can access their   same company desktop  with all their data on it from nearly every   computer in the world to  bring the user more flexibility.

Gardner: If you were advising  someone on what to learn from  your experience  as they now move toward  desktop virtualization, any  thoughts about  what you would recommend for  them?

Inform other departments

Karbginski: The most important thing is to get in touch with the other  departments   and inform them about the thing you're doing. Also, inform  the user  help  desk directly at the beginning of the project. So take  time to  inform  them what desktop virtualization means and which  processes will  change,  because we know most of our colleagues had a  wrong  understanding of  virtualization.

They think that  with virtualization, everything will change and we'll   need other  support servers, and it's just a new thing and nobody needs   it. If you  inform them what you're doing that nothing will be changed   for them,  because all support processes are the same as before, they   will accept  it and understand the benefits for the company and for the   user.

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