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

Available at www.unidesk.com/resources/webinars

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

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