USF Health Shares VDI Best Practices Richard Savage Systems Administrator May 29, 2014
About USF Health Located in Tampa, FL Education, Research, and Patient Care Partnership with University of South Florida Morsani College of Medicine College of Nursing College of Public Health College of Pharmacy School of Biomedical Sciences School of Physical Therapy and Rehabilitation Sciences Doctors of USF Health
Our IT Team and Who We Serve 2-person IT team for virtualization Broad set of use cases USF Students USF Professors Practicing Physicians in the Clinic Operating Rooms Procedure Rooms
Why VDI? In Healthcare, desktops MUST perform well Clinicians want instant-on, follow-me high performance experience Give clinicians and staff faster, more secure access to key healthcare apps Apps change constantly, desktops require frequent re-config Both harder to do on physical PCs Reduce cost, IT effort needed to deliver desktops and keep Windows and applications up to date See above BYOD enabled by VDI lets us support clinician needs for mobility Growing quickly need to be able to scale desktops on-demand Privacy, security, and compliance of getting data off the edge
Our Implementation Approach Make IT the guinea pigs Large in-house development team, CIO, and rest of IT went to virtual desktops first If it worked for us, it can work for clinicians Try to satisfy most difficult non-it use cases first Operating and Procedure rooms
2 Big Takeaways From Research & Initial Rollout Storage performance doesn t scale on spinning disk I/O performance and availability not acceptable Configuration and troubleshooting too difficult Virtualizing ~100 apps and managing our different desktop configs were too hard for our small IT team AllScripts EMR and GE Centricity plug-ins for PACS, radiology Visual C++, Visual Studio,.NET for in-house developers Firefox, Google Chrome, Office, SAS, Pharos, ArcGIS for staff Too many Windows images to patch
Storage Solution: Pure Storage 8TB all-flash storage array Virtual Desktop uptime of 99% 10.3:1 data de-duplication Tremendous desktop density: 4GB per desktop Ideal fit with Unidesk virtual appliance architecture Provides consistent, seamless uptime Latency is less than one millisecond Incredible user experience
Management Solution: Unidesk Provision non-persistent desktops and persistent desktops Operating and Procedure rooms have non-persistent desktops IT, Clinical, General Staff users have persistent desktops One Gold Windows OS layer (shared VMDK) for easy patching No needed for multiple images for each cloned parent VM Application layering package once, apps act as if locally installed Apps stored as unique VMDKs, shared by many desktops AllScripts EHR, developer tools interoperate with all dependent apps Easy! Takes only a few minutes per app, same as installing on a regular PC Rollback Personalization layer for instant break/fix Installs quickly as vsphere appliances Integrates with VMware Horizon View Adds layered VMs to View pools for access through View clients Small storage footprint Pure Storage enhances Unidesk s shared VMDK architecture so each persistent and non-persistent desktop uses only 4 GB of storage The Magic of Layers
Our VDI Stack Today ~380 virtual desktops 50 persistent 330 non persistent 81 application layers 1 Windows 7 OS layer Not including images for testing and development 120 desktops per blade 7 UCS B230-M2 w/ 512GB Samsung SyncMaster NC240
Learnings and Future Plans VDI with Pure Storage, Unidesk, and VMware Horizon View is a success Seeing a 10.3:1 storage reduction and great performance with Pure Storage Unidesk eliminates need for clone replicas and re-composes, so we re saving space, making end users happier with persistent desktops, and scaling with 1 gold image and simple app layering Continuing our rollout, focusing on clinical users next
Live Demo!
More VDI Customer Webinars Available On-Demand Higher Education Colby-Sawyer College Gateway Technical College Massachusetts Maritime Academy Menlo College Mercer University Southeastern Community College Southwestern Michigan College Tennessee Tech University University of Connecticut University of Maryland University of Wisconsin Oshkosh William Woods University USC School of Medicine Greenville Public Sector (State/Local Government) County of Hamilton, Indiana County of Vigo, Indiana County of Tulare, California City of Kent, Washington City of Yuma, Arizona Port Authority of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania South Taranaki District Council, NZ State of Minnesota Dept. Human Services State of Ohio Dept. of Developmental Disabilities State of Wisconsin Dept. of Children and Families Tarrant Regional Water District, Texas Architecture and Engineering Egan Construction STV, Inc. Legal Bernstein Shur Law Firm Manufacturing TIPPER TIE, Inc. K-12 Education Waxahachie Independent School District, Texas Fresno County Office of Education Healthcare Sunrise Health Region USF Health Available at www.unidesk.com/resources/webinars
Q&A, Next Steps, and Thank You! Connect with Richard about VDI or other IT projects: rsavage@health.usf.edu Learn more about Web site: www.unidesk.com Bi-weekly technical webinar Date: Every other Tuesday at 2pm Register: www.unidesk.com/demo Learn more about Web site: www.purestorage.com Product overview www.purestorage.com/flash-array