Gardner: You've been successful with server virtualization, but what made it important for you now to   extend virtualization to the desktop?

Brames: One of the things that is important to our district we noticed when doing an assessment   of our infrastructure:  We have aging endpoints. We had a need to  extend  the refresh rate of  our desktop computers from what was typical  -- for a  lot of school  districts typical is about a 5-year refresh rate  -- to  getting  anywhere from 7 to 10, maybe even 12 years, out of a desktop computer.

By going to a thin client model and connecting those machines to a virtual desktop, we're able   to  achieve high quality results for our end users, while still giving   them  computing power that they need and allowing us to have the cost   savings  by negating the need to purchase new equipment every five   years.

By going with   virtual environment, the problem that we  were looking to solve was   really just that -- how do we provide  extended refresh rate for all of our devices?

Supporting 5,500 computers

We're  located about 12 miles west of Indianapolis, Indiana, and we have 13  instructional   buildings. We're a pre-K-to-12 institution and we have  approximately   8,700 students, nearing 10,000 end-users in total. We’re  currently   supporting about 5,500 computers in our district.

...  Currently  have  400 View desktop licenses. We’re seeing utilization of  that  license pool  of 20-25 percent right now, and the primary reason  that  we’re seeing  that utilization is because we’re really just  beginning  that phase, with  this being our first year for our virtual  desktop roll  out. We’re  really in the second year, but the first year  of more  widespread use.

We’re  training teachers on how to  adequately and  effectively use this  technology in their classroom with  kids It's been  very highly received  and is being adopted very well in  our classrooms,  because people are  seeing that we were able to  improve the computing  experience for them.

Lantz: With that many devices, getting out there and installing software, even  if it’s a push, locally, or what have you, there's a big management  overhead there. By using VMware View and having that in our data center,    where we can control that, the ability to have your golden image that    you can then push out to a number of devices has made it a lot easier   to  transition to this type of model.

We’re finding that we can   get  applications out quicker with more quality control, as far as   knowing  exactly what’s going to happen inside of the virtual machine (VM) when you run that application. So that’s been a big help.

A lot of our  applications are Web-based, Education City.  It’s a lot of  graphics and video. And we found that  we're still able  to run those in  our View environment and not have  issues.

Gardner: What are you  running in terms of servers? What is  your desktop  virtualization  platform, and what is it that allows you to  move on  this so far?

Lantz: On the server side, we're running VMware vSphere 4.1.  On the desktop side, we're running View 4.6.   Currently in our server  production, as we call it, we have three   servers. And we're adding a  fourth shortly. On the View side of things,   we currently have two  servers and we’re getting two more in the next   month or so. So we’ll  have a total of four.

Access from anywhere

Gardner: Now one of the nice things about the desktop virtualization and this    BYOD is it allows people to access these activities more freely    anywhere. How do you manage to take  what was once confined to the  school network and allow the  students and  other folks in your  community to do what they need to do,  regardless of  where they are,  regardless of the device?

Brames: We’re a  fairly affluent community. We have kids who were requesting to   bring in  their own devices. We felt as though encouraging that model   in our  district was something that would help students continue to use    computers that were familiar to them and help us realize some cost    savings long term.

So by connecting to virtual desktops in our    environment, they get a familiar resource while they're within our walls    in the school district, have access to all of their shared drives,    network drives, network applications, all of the typical resources that    are an expectation of sitting down in front of a school-owned piece of    equipment. And they're seeing the availability of all of those things   on  their own device.

... A typical   classroom for us contains  four student computing stations, as well as,   depending upon the  building size, three to five labs available. We’re   not focusing our  desktop virtualization on those labs. We’re focusing on   the classroom  computing stations right now. Potentially, we'll also be   in labs, as  we go into the future.

Then, in addition to those   student  computing stations, we’re seeing those applications where our    administrative team or principals and our district-level administrators    are able to begin using virtual desktops to access while they’re   outside  of the district and growing familiar with that, so that   whenever we  enter into that phase where we’re allowing our students to   access from  outside of our network, we have that support structure in   place.

... We’re also seeing an influx of more mobile-type devices such as tablets and even smartphones and things like that. The percentage of our users that are using    tablets and smartphones right now for powerful computing or their    primary devices is fairly low. However, we anticipate over time that the    variety of devices we’ll have connecting to our network because of    virtual desktops is going to increase.

Gardner: How is that hand-off  happening? Are you able to provide a unified experience  yet?

Lantz: That’s part of phase two of our approach that  we’re implementing  right  now. We’ve gotten it out into the classrooms to  get the students   familiar with it, so that they understand how to use  it. The next  step  in that process is to allow them to use this at home.

We    currently have administrators that are using it in this fashion. They    have tablets and are using the View client they connect in and get the    same experience if they're in school or out of school.

So we’re    to that point. Now that our administrators understand the benefits,  now   that our teachers have seen it in the classrooms, it’s a matter of    getting it out there to the community.

One of the other ways  that   we’re making it available is that at our public library, we have a  set   of machines that students can access as well, because as you  know, not   every student has access to high-speed Internet, but they  are able to  go  to library, check out these machines, and be able to  get into the   network that way. Those are some of the ways that we’re  trying to bridge   that gap.

Huge win-win

Technology Integration Group has resources that allow us to see what other school districts are    doing and what are some of the things that they’ve run into. Then, they    bring back here and we can discuss how we want to roll it out in our    environment. They’ve been very good at giving us ideas of what has    worked with other organizations and what hasn’t. That’s where they've    come in. They’ve really helped us understand how we can best use this in    our environment.

Gardner: I  often hear from   organizations, when they move to desktop  virtualization, that there are   some impacts on things like network or  storage that they didn’t fully   anticipate. How has that worked for  you? How has this roll out movement   towards increased desktop  virtualization impacted you in terms of what   you needed to do with  your overall infrastructure?

Lantz: Luckily for us we’ve had a lot of growth in the last two to three   years,  which has allowed us to get some newer equipment. So our network    infrastructure is very sound. We didn’t run into a lot of the issues    that commonly you would with network bandwidth and things like that.

On the storage side, we did increase our storage. We went with an EqualLogic box for that, but with View, it doesn’t take up a ton of storage  space   with link clones and things like that. So having seen a huge  impact   there, now as we get further into this, storage requirements  will get   greater, but currently that hasn’t been a big issue for us.

Gardner: On the flip-side of that, a lot of organizations I talk to, who moved    to desktop virtualization, gained some benefits on things like  backup,   disaster recovery, security, and control over data and assets,  and even   into compliance and regulatory issues. Has there been an  upside that  you  could point to in terms of being a more centralized  control of the   desktop content and assets?

Difficult to monitor

Lantz: When you start talking about students bringing in their own devices,    it's difficult to monitor what's on that personally owned device.

We   found that  by giving them a View desktop, we know what's in our   environment and we  know what that virtual machine has. That allows us   to have more secure  access for those students without compromising   what's on that student’s  machine, or what you may not know about what's   on that student’s  machine. That’s been a big benefit for us allowing   students to bring in  their own devices.

Gardner: Do we have any metrics of success either in business or, in this  case,   learning terms and/or IT cost savings? What has this done for  you? I   know it's a little early, but what's the early results?

Brames: You did mention that it is a little bit early, but we believe that as    we begin using virtual desktops more so in our environment, one of  the   major cost savings that we’re going to see as a result is  licensing  cost  for unique learning applications.

Typically in our district we would have purchased x    number of licenses for each one of our instructional buildings  because   they needed to utilize that with students in the classroom.  They may   have a certain number of students that need access to this  application,   for example, but they're not all accessing it during the  same time of   the day or it's on a machine that’s on a fat client, a  physical machine   somewhere in the building, and it's difficult for  students to have   access to it.

By creating these pools of  machines that have   specialty software on them we’re able to  significantly reduce the number   of titles we need to license for  certain learning applications or   certain applications that improve  efficiencies for teachers and for   students.

So that’s one area  in which we know we’re going to see   significant return on our  investment. We already talked about extending   the endpoints, and with  energy savings, I think we can prove some   results there as well.  Anything to add, Jason?

Lantz: One    of the ones that’s hard to calculate is, as you mentioned, maintenance    or management of this piece and technology, as we all know you’re  doing   more with less. This really gives you the ability to do that.  How you   measure that is sometimes difficult, but there are definitely  cost   savings there as well.

Gardner: I know budgets are really important in just about any school    environment. Do you have any   sense of the delta there between what it  would be if you stuck to   traditional cost structures, traditional  licensing, fat client, to get   to that one to one ratio, compared to  what you’re going to be able to do   over time with this virtualized  approach?

Brames: Our Advanced    Learning Center is the school building that has primarily senior    students and advanced placement students. There are about 600 students    that attend there.

Last year, 75 percent of those students were    using school-owned equipment and 25 percent of them were bringing  their   own laptops to school. This year, what we have seen is that 43  percent   of our students are beginning to bring their own devices to  connect to   our network and have access to network resources.

If  that trend   continues, which we think it will, we’ll be looking at  certainly over  50  percent next year, hopefully approaching 60-65  percent of our  students  bringing their own devices. When you consider  that that is  approximately  400 devices that the school district did  not need to  invest in, that’s a  significant saving for us.

Gardner: If you could do this over   again, a little bit of 20/20 hindsight,  what might you want to tell others   in terms of being prepared?

Lantz: One thing that’s   important is that when you explain this to users,  the words "virtual   desktop" can be a little confusing to teachers and  your end-users. What   I've done is taken the approach of it’s no  different than having a   regular machine and you can set it up to where  it looks exactly the   same.

No real difference

When    you start talking with end users about virtual, it gets into, okay,   "So  it’s running back here, but what problems am I going to encounter?"   and  those sort of things. Trying to get that end user to realize that   there  really isn’t a difference between a virtual desktop and a real   desktop  has been important for us for getting them on board and making   them  understand that it’s not going to be a huge change for them.

• WMworld Case Study: City of Farifield Uses Virtualization to More Efficiently Deliver Crucial City Services
• Case Study: CharterCARE Health Partners Leverages Cloud and VDI to Aid Digital Records Management and Regulatory Compliance
• Tampa Bay Rays Hit Home Run with Virtualization that Enables Tablet Applications Delivery in the Field
• VMware's Carl Eschenbach on the Scope and Depth of Cloud Computing and How CIOs Will Have to Adapt
• VMworld Showcase: How ADP Dealer Services benefits from VMware View in its expanding use of desktop virtualization
• VMworld Case Study: City of Pittsburgh's IT success and the beneficial synergy between virtualized servers and desktops