Miramadrid School: IT simplifies management with UDS Enterprise

• Name: Miramadrid School

• Sector: Education

• Students: More than 2,000

• Teachers: 200

• Location: Paracuellos del Jarama (Madrid, Spain)

The Systems Department of the Miramadrid School faced every day the challenge of managing 150 computers acquired years ago. It was a complex task, which involved great effort and very high costs.

To solve this problem, at the beginning of 2017 they implemented a virtual desktop infrastructure. “Thanks to the decision to virtualize the workstations, the management of the PCs was automatically simplified and the issues caused by the obsolescence of the equipment were reduced”, explained Alberto de Miguel, ICT Coordinator at the educational center.

JMG Virtual Consulting helped them to deal with this technological change. They suggested trusting the UDS Enterprise connection broker, the Nutanix Acropolis hypervisor (AHV) and hyperconverged hardware from the same manufacturer as main components of the platform. “These solutions are seamlessly integrated, providing incredibly good versatility, scaling and performance”, said Miguel Ángel Alonso, Virtualization Solutions Architect at JMG Virtual Consulting.

“UDS Enterprise was the first VDI solution to which Nutanix granted the Nutanix Ready certification, which means that together they make up a 100% reliable and homogeneous solution, without any fissure“, adds the expert.

The implementation of the desktop virtualization infrastructure was carried out in an “agile and efficient way; choosing JMG Virtual Consulting was a wise choice, they are great professionals”, assesed the ICT Coordinator of the school, who also highlights the work of the UDS Enterprise support team, whose availability and explanations “are always excellent”.

The VDI platform was up and running in record time, and the IT team at the school immediately learned how to use it. “UDS Enterprise is a very intuitive solution, so creating and managing virtual desktops is really simple. Teaching how to use the tool was extraordinarily easy and consequently fast. The learning curve was so short that in a few days the client was already autonomous”, said Miguel Ángel Alonso.

With the initial operation of VDI, IT increased its productivity virtually from day to day. “Making a deployment with UDS Enterprise is so easy that in half an hour it is possible to have all the desktops in a classroom working, compared to the days or even weeks it took before”, said the ICT Coordinator.

In addition, “the centralized management of all virtual desktops allows us to update computers and solve technical issues quickly and easily. If, for example, a physical device is damaged, we keep on working on the virtual one, as if they were clones, eliminating downtime”, commented de Miguel.

Cost savings thanks to VDI

Time saving regarding IT work and efficiency fixing issues implies important cost savings, that are even more increased thanks to the lower energy consumption of the VDI infrastructure and to the possibility of reusing the existing computers as connection devices to virtual desktops.

The great versatility of UDS Enterprise, which is compatible with a wide range of connection clients, will allow them to save much more in the future. The ICT Coordinator of the Miramadrid School pointed out that they are planning to “significantly reduce the investment substituting physical terminals for low-cost devices, such as Raspberry Pi“.

Thanks to desktop virtualization, the more than 2,000 students of the Miramadrid School enjoy much more modern computer classrooms, from which the development of technological and computer activities is enhanced. Each academic year, around 16,500 non-persistent Windows 7 virtual desktops are deployed with a high performance and high availability infrastructure, which guarantees security and provides an agile recovery from disasters. According to JMG, “the project aimed to improve the availability and performance of their PCs and we succeeded. The school’s data center is now a more simplified, secure and optimized environment”.

The experience with VDI is turning out to be so satisfying that the Systems Department of the Miramadrid School is already thinking of “virtualizing the rest of the workplaces, so that all the users and workers of the center can enjoy the multiple advantages of desktop virtualization with UDS Enterprise and Nutanix”, concluded Alberto de Miguel.

VDI INFRASTRUCTURE

• Broker: UDS Enterprise

• Hypervisor: Nutanix Acropolis (AHV)

• Connection protocol: RDP

• Authenticator: Microsoft DC

• VDI OS: Windows 7

• Access OS: Ubuntu and Windows 7

• Hyperconvergence platform: 3 Nutanix nodes on switch Allied (1 GB)