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The University of Tennessee is the largest land-grant institution in the state.
We have approximately 28,000 students.
About 27,000 of those use our computer labs every year.
My role has been to help build, and design, and roll out our desktop virtualization system.
Our lab support team has had to face three major challenges, the first is
the sheer breadth and variety in our environment. We support 36 computer labs,
with over 1,000 machines on campus. We support over 100 different applications.
One of the primary requests from students is to have all of our applications available
in all of our labs, especially to make those applications available remotely.
The second challenge is we support every operating system
that's popular these days: Mac, Linux, Windows.
The third challenge is that our IT staff, especially on our lab support team has been reduced.
We formally had four dedicated support staff and we've been reduced to two.
We weren't interested in delivering just VDI. We needed to deliver published applications,
published desktops in a hosted, shared environment.
As well as full virtual desktops in a VDI environment.
We were pitched Cisco UCS and we really liked it.
We were impressed with the architecture, the flexibility, frankly just the footprint.
Being able to cram that much CPU and memory into that small a space was phenomenal.
Our C-level execs wanted to go with an integrated stack, we wanted Cisco UCS.
At the same time, in a parallel fashion, we were looking at new storage,
and all of our technical folks were very impressed with the NetApp storage.
So the FlexPod just made the most sense. We've deployed Citrix XenDesktop
on FlexPod. We run that on Cisco UCS blades, primarily B200 blades right now
with 48 or 96 gigs of RAM. We run that on NetApp storage.
The current system is specced to deliver service to up to 1,500 current users.
About 1,000 of those at anytime will be in our computer labs.
The other 500 will be remote users. I would imagine that we will eventually grow
to support several thousand concurrent users.
What I know is that I have more computing power in one of my blades,
in the space of two MacBooks than five of my servers that I had before.
The most impressive benefit that we've received so far
is that we now have the capability, with the systems that are running on the FlexPod,
to survive a planned data center outage.
And even to a certain extent, perhaps an unplanned data center outage.
It makes me happy, it makes me satisfied
to deliver good service to our professors and to our students.
And being able to receive an email late on a Thursday from a professor
who says, "I really have to have this application for next week." I at least have the
chance of being able to make that professor happy, and even impress him now.
In many cases, I can virtualize and deliver an application in minutes, even hours.
I can certainly meet or beat our former
ten day deployment time, especially going forward.
Our IT organization has a great relationship with the customer already;
and I see Apps@UT, the system we built, being just another
great feather in our cap for an example of how
we strive to offer excellent service to the university.