B4: Migrating towards fully virtual

environments

Speakers: Gordon Flack

Assistant Director of ICT Alliance Homes Lee Richardson

Systems Engineer Together Housing Group

Migrating Towards Fully Virtualised Environments

Gordon Flack

Assistant Director (ICT)

Alliance Homes

• A community-based social enterprise based in North Somerset.

• Have an annual turnover of more than £28 million, employ around 280 staff

and work in partnership with local, regional and national agencies.

• Own around 6,500 properties and provide housing and housing-related

support to 8,000 people.

• Established in 2006 to manage homes transferred from North Somerset

Council.

About Alliance Homes Group

The Group consists of three areas:

About Alliance Homes Group

Alliance Homes provides housing management

services.

Alliance Ventures provides repairs, maintenance

and green energy initiatives, including our

successful PV panel project.

Alliance Living provides care and support services.

Our mission is to create hope for people and communities, through

developing opportunities, tackling inequalities and delivering service

excellence.

It can be summarised as creating hope though:

Our Mission

In the beginning

• Hardware estate inherited from the Council.

• Quality of kit = less than desirable

• Dell PCs of varying ages

• Windows XP

• Out of warranty

The Old Kit

The Support Burden

• Expensive support overhead

– Patching

– Memory upgrades

– Defrag; scandisk; temp file removal

– Crossed fingers!

• Lots of repeat calls, lots of repeat actions, lots of frustrations

Why Virtualise? • Some experience of server virtualisation.

• Report from NCC into Green IT

• Reduce the TCO of desktop infrastructure

• Shared experience of the benefits from others

• Perceived cost benefits over fat client solution

• Improved mobility for front line staff

Making the Case for Change

• Financial case wasn’t strong

• Some key drivers

– The VAT increases in January 2011

– Bringing our repairs contract in-house

• Need to upgrade OS and Office

Shopping Around

• Site Visit to other RPs

• Undertook an OJEU procurement to find the best solution.

• VM vs Citrix

• Implementation of Citrix using XenApp with Citrix Access Gateway

The New Kit

The Implementation

• Keeping users on board

– Team meetings

– Staff conference

• Communicate the project plan

• Communicate the rollout plan

The Pitfalls

• Microsoft Licensing – Visio & Project

• Video streaming quality is less

• Single log-in

• More difficult to cater for individual needs

• Difficulties in implementing Xen Desktop

The Upsides

• Improved performance across all applications

• Reduced support calls – Less travelling to sites – Provisioning of apps faster – Provisioning of new kit is quicker.

• Less energy used • Citrix Access Gateway

Was it Worth the Investment?

• Support calls reduced = more time spent on planned projects

• User satisfaction maintained at high level

• Faster performance on key business systems

• Staff are more productive, with many accessing systems from home

Next Steps

• P2V on legacy servers

• About 75% complete

• Project to complete by March 2015

Impartial advice from a supportive

community

Desktop Virtualisation

• Stuart Curran

• Lee Richardson

www.togetherhousing.co.uk

Why....?

• New Group Housing Management System

• Flexible Working

• Small team / large geographic area

• We wanted to do it !

Plan....

• Didn’t believe the hype

• VMWare View already in use

• Develop our own performance criteria

• Make the decision based on our experience

• Flexible approach

Performance....?

• IOPS IOPS IOPS ??

• 5 major Vendors

• User experience measures

• Stress tested against OUR criteria

• Transparency

How....?

• Built Desktop images based on ICT knowledge

• Used existing kit with Windows 7 install

• 10 staff

• 700 endpoints

• 47 sites

• 6 weeks

• Including 5 new Customer Service Centres

Benefits....?

• Obvious

– Application Upgrades

– Roaming experience

– Flexible working

– Re-create “broken” machines

– Minimum disruption

• Nice surprise

– Real time reprovisioning

Devil in disguise....?

• Reliance on WAN

• Reliance on SAN

• Reliance on DR

• Increased user expectation