UPV: increased productivity and cost savings thanks to VDI

• Name: Universitat Politècnica de València

• Sector: Education

• Number of students: 28,977

• Number of Teachers: 3,658

• Administrative & service staff: 1,512

• Number of colleges and location: Vera (Valencia), Alcoy and Gandía

The Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV) has been one of the pioneer universities in the adoption of desktop virtualization in Spain. In 2008 they already had several services of this type. During the 2017-2018 academic year the Vice-Rector for Digital Resources and Documentation decided to go one step further and promoted a new and ambitious project. They set the objective of standardizing the management of all the computer classrooms, improving and making more flexible the implementation of vApp and the control of software licensing.

The project was assigned to the Information and Communications Systems Area (ASIC), which had to coordinate the implementation of VDI in all the Schools and Faculties of Vera, Alcoy and Gandía campuses, facing the challenge of managing multiple environments at the same time, where micro informatics is decentralized and there are many different dynamics of work and services to users. The VDI and vApp UDS Enterprise connection broker was the perfect ally to successfully overcome this challenge.

In the first phase of the project, virtualization of desktops was implemented in the computer rooms of all the Schools and Faculties of the three campuses. “Thanks to UDS Enterprise there was an increase in productivity, a substantial saving in infrastructure and electricity costs, which resulted in a lower environmental impact,” explains José Vicente Roselló, VDI Project Manager at the Universitat Politècnica de València.

These results encouraged them to start a second phase, extending the adoption of VDI to university departments and to Services such as Economic Management and the Electronic Processes and Transparency Service. In the latter, desktop virtualization is helping them to tackle the complexity of applications and their implementation on users’ computers. “UDS Enterprise has simplified and made the installation and maintenance of applications and workstations more flexible. Thanks to this technology, the administrative staff enjoys greater availability of applications and higher security with the data they handle, improving their work performance, ” says Roselló.

The more than 4,000 teachers and almost 29,000 students of the UPV are also benefiting from the advantages of VDI: “now they have access to the teaching applications from any location and device regardless of their operating system and, in addition, they do not have to waste time in installing them on their computers,” comments the head of PoliLabs.

VERSATILE AND EFFICIENT VDI & vApp ENVIRONMENT

One of the handicaps of this project was that they needed software capable of managing more than 100 virtual applications and more than 20 Windows and Linux virtual desktops with different configurations from the same environment. All in high availability, accessible 24 hours a day.

When choosing the solution with which they could assemble their infrastructure in the most efficient way possible, the UPV put itself in the hands of our trusted Gold Partner B2Dev, which was clear that UDS Enterprise was the VDI broker they needed. “They wanted a solution that offered both persistent and non-persistent desktops and virtual applications without installing any software on client devices. In addition, they wanted to minimize support tasks and control software licensing. UDS Enterprise meets all these requirements, ” states B2Dev CEO.

The head of this company relies fully on UDS Enterprise for their customers’ VDI projects because “it is very easy to handle for both users and system administrators and is compatible with different virtualization platforms, connection protocols, authentication systems… ”

“The work of B2Dev has been faultless. Thanks to their recommendation we have implemented the best VDI solution for the University. When we were introduced the software we loved its simplicity of use and its affordable price. Its implementation in a large number of universities finally convinced us, ” reveals José Vicente Roselló.

Once they decided to give it a try, “we received great support from the UDS Enterprise team, a professional, fast and excellent service,” he affirms.

VDI INFRASTRUCTURE

• Broker: UDS Enterprise

• Hypervisor: VMware vSphere

• Connection protocols: RDP and HTML5

• Authenticator: Active Directory and LDAP

• VDI OS: Windows Server 2019, Windows 10, Ubuntu and CentOS

• Windows vvApp : 118 applications in several languages and versions:

   Office, LlibreOffice, OpenOffice, engineering applications…

   Around 25 own applications

• Servers: 12 DELL PowerEdge R640

• Storage: 2 IBM Stormize V7000F arrays