1. UCISA Award for Excellence
2011
A flexible and energy efficient virtual desktop for Anglia Ruskin University
Institution Details
Institution Name: Anglia Ruskin University
Originating Department: IT Services
Contact Name: Gregor Waddell, 07872 131415, Gregor.waddell@anglia.ac.uk
Project: New IT Desktop
Key Project Staff:
Gregor Waddell – Assistant Director
Tim Kitchener – Infrastructure Architect
Project Background – Obsolete, inefficient IT and new buildings
Our Microsoft XP based student and staff desktop was becoming obsolete, difficult to
manage and National Student Survey scores suggested a rising dissatisfaction with IT. As
part of our commitment to providing excellent student facilities, we also needed to provide a
new 300 seat student IT open access area for our Cambridge campus. The building that
would host the new open access area assumed no need for cooling – presenting a potential
heat issue if traditional PCs were deployed. Our increased use of IT as a foundation to
much of our work also saw a substantial increase in overall power consumption.
Anglia Ruskin University had an overall estate of around 4,500 Windows XP based PCs –
supporting a vibrant and diverse student population of 32,000.

2. Of course, the last few years has seen a focus on innovations such has Hosted Virtual
Desktops, application virtualisation, thin clients and other technologies. We were keen to
understand how these innovations could benefit our University.
Project Objectives
Our central motivation for the project was to deliver an excellent experience for our students
as well as deliver a new 300 seat Cambridge student IT open access area.
We wanted to provide a modern and attractive desktop to our student and staff community
and leverage recent technology innovations to reduce cost and improve our ability to deliver
software to those who need them irrespective of location.
Implicit within this overall objective was the need to upgrade our aging and clunky Windows
XP desktop to Windows 7. We were also wary of the costs and effort required to upgrade
and of introducing unnecessary complexity into our new desktop.
In common with other organisations, we were and are strongly motivated to reduce or at
least contain our power consumption and contribute to sustainability objectives within our
corporate plan.
Perhaps the most compelling and urgent objective was to provide a brand new IT open
access area for 300 student workstations – without the need for air conditioning. The new
building did not contain any provision for cooling 300 PCs and people. We had six months
until the new building was scheduled to open.
Tentative first steps, technologies and doubts
We were convinced by the concept and advantages of virtualisation for our server
infrastructure and had already pushed almost all of our server estate over to VMWare
Sphere based virtualisation. This naturally lead us to consider Desktop Virtualisation and
related thin client technologies as a potential way forward but were conscious of their relative
immaturity. We thought that there was a good potential for power saving compared to a
standard PCs but we needed more empirical evidence based on our own environment.
We understood some of the issues around desktop virtualisation because of an earlier Proof
Of Concept. However, this hadn’t gone well. Ideally, we wanted the end user experience to
be identical or even better than that provided by a standard PC. For us that meant delivering
video and good quality sound. However, the earlier Proof Of Concept had shown very poor
video and sound performance. Certainly, the user experience was far worse than that we
would wish to provide to our students. We also saw that back-end storage performance was
a real limiting factor in a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure environment. The storage
performance required far exceeded what we could provide from our Storage Area Network.
Our first 2010 era Proof Of Concept contained:
1) Hosted Virtual Desktop software – we tried both VMWare View and Citrix
ZenDesktop
2) Video protocols – RDP, Citrix ICA and others
3) Two HP DL380 Servers
4) HDS Storage Area Network – 500GB spread across 10 Fibre Channel disks.
5) A number of thin clients – using Windows XP embedded and linux
6) Windows 7, standard Microsoft Office and other user software

3. We were also disappointed by power consumption figures with the POC actually consuming
more power than traditional PCs.
Technical innovations and maturing technology
Obviously, Hosted Virtual Desktop technology has rapidly evolved in the last couple of years.
But, had the technology matured sufficiently? We knew our main challenges were:
 Video and sound quality
 Excellent storage performance
 Power consumption – realising the potential savings
 Return on Investment
 Disaster recovery and resilience
 And, most importantly providing a PC like or better experience for our students
During 2010 video and sound became less of an issue with the introduction of new protocols
to support video and sound. Both Citrix and VMWare (and others) worked to address this
problem and introduced competing and much better technologies.
Lower cost Solid State Storage became more available and was specifically targeted at
Hosted Virtual Desktop environments.
LED and LCD based zero-clients were available – providing lower power end user thin
clients. Combined with Solid State Disk (SSD) based storage and blade servers, a much
more compelling low power argument was evident.
An updated technical architecture and delivery into a new building
We learned from our earlier experiences and developed a new technical architecture based
on VMWare View to deliver a short and sharp trial to 30-40 concurrent users. We also ran
performance test to simulate 500 concurrent users – which included streaming video.
Our design brief was to provide a solution which would scale to at least 800 concurrent users
with no appreciable degradation to user experience. We also introduced a resilient
architecture - avoiding single points of failure
Our (mostly borrowed) new architecture comprised of:
1) Solid State Storage from Violin Memory – providing backend storage for our virtual
machines
2) HP Blade servers
3) 10Gbit network back bone
4) Low power zero clients from Samsung (LCD) and LG (LED)
5) VMWare View 4.6
6) Windows 7, Office 2010 in a single image
7) Other applications streamed to our Virtual Machines using Microsoft AppV –
ensuring as simple and small as possible Virtual Machine
8) PCOIP – Remote display technology from Teradici and supplied with VMWare View
We also provided remote Internet based access from anywhere using PCs and iPads.
Our new Hosted Virtual Desktop solution performed well – providing an almost
indistinguishable user experience to that provided by traditional PCs. We also saw overall
reduced power consumption with around a 30-40% saving, per user, when compared to
traditional PCs and monitors. We also calculated that our overall capital expenditure would

4. be similar to that of a PC deployment at numbers greater than around 500 concurrent users
with a saving, year on year, in support and management costs. Our flexibility to deploy new
software easily was also a clear advantage. We also saw that Hosted Virtual Desktops may
require a new approach to support and management to get the best out of the environment –
a new multi-disciplined team with combined server, storage and desktop skills.
Launching the new desktop
We successfully launched our new Hosted Virtual Desktop into the new IT open access area
and also our Library in September 2011 – initially providing capacity for around 400
concurrent desktops.
Feedback from our students and Student Union has been excellent. Our architecture has
allowed speedy addition of new software e.g. Adobe Dreamweaver. We have also realised
potential software license savings where software can be licensed on a concurrent basis
rather than a ‘per seat basis.
We have also restructured our department to provide a small dedicated Hosted Virtual
Desktop team with combined desktop, server and storage skills. Importantly, this team is
focused on student experience and is driven by user feedback. The team is empowered to
continually review and improve the service provided to our students.
The new desktop – on a Samsung based zero client
Working with a zero client distributer, we are also trialling a specially designed low power
adapter which promises to reduce power consumption in our zero client LED based LG
panels by a further 10-20%.

5. We launched a new external access to the student desktop in late December 2011 –
providing students with access to their software from home and elsewhere. This has proved
popular with around 100 students using the new service over Christmas.
Our new IT open access area.
Into the future
The new desktop is rolling out to the rest of our student IT open access areas and we expect
to reach around 1000 concurrent users during spring 2012. Our new desktop is also being
rolled out to our staff - with most of our specific software such as Tribal SITS being delivered
using application virtualisation.
We divided our staff and student IT use into a number of different categories. We currently
see around 35-50% of our users as being straightforward candidates for our Hosted Virtual
Desktop. We see almost all students and staff making use of our remote access capability.
We have introduced application virtualisation as the default means to deploy software across
our IT estate – minimising complexity in our standard images whether they are virtual or
traditional.
Of course, not all software is suitable to be used in a Hosted Virtual Desktop and we expect
to see traditional ‘thick clients’ being used into the future but for smaller numbers of users.
In conclusion
Our new desktop has received excellent feedback and we consider Hosted Virtual Desktop
and the other supporting technologies to be a viable and realistic alternative to traditional
PCs whilst providing a range of additional benefits.

6. Return on Investment
Our Hosted Virtual Desktop infrastructure, associated software costs, training, consultancy
and 400 thin clients had a total budget similar to that required to provide traditional PCs.
This provided a server and software capability (e.g. VMWare View licenses) for around 600-
700 concurrent users. Our storage capacity is able to support around 1400 concurrent
‘standard’ users without further upgrade.
Additional users may be added up to our existing server capacity of 600-700 concurrent
users by either adding thin or zero clients or by reusing existing PCs.
Predicted power total consumption is <60-70% of comparable Windows 7 based PCs (using
thin client devices). This includes all server and storage power consumption.
As the number of users increase, costs will reduce up to the limits of the existing SSD
storage capacity – around 1400 concurrent users. Of course, this is dependent on the actual
workload caused by the student or staff member.
Internal staff costs have not been included but averaged around two staff working for nine
months to implement the new solution.
Transference of Best Practice
Our solution is built on standard software and hardware and our University is enthusiastic to
share knowledge and experience around the community.