Success Stories

Challenge: TERACAI, a solutions provider and Liquidware Labs' channel partner, relies on Liquidware Labs Stratusphere™ UX to report on the progress of their VDI project, as well as to perform "health checks" on the environment. The solution supports visibility, diagnosis and optimization of virtual desktops while also collecting data at the desktop, network, server, storage and hypervisor levels across multiple virtual and physical platforms. As the virtual desktop environment has grown at TERACI and as end-user desktop performance has improved, the company has also been able to redeploy half of its desktop help desk staff to other functions.

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Challenge: The East Coast office that had spearheaded desktop virtualization had been increasing collaboration with a business unit in the Midwest. The two organizations wanted to be able to transfer more work to the Midwest, to better balance workloads and take advantage of lower operating costs. However, different desktop environments at the two facilities were a barrier to increased collaboration. The company wanted to create a private network to host virtual desktops that employees in the Midwest could access to seamlessly run applications despite the IT infrastructure differences. The project would involve creating hundreds of virtual desktops and could grow to thousands – far beyond the scale of anything it had tried before. They deployed non-persistent linked clones with VMware View paired with persistent user personalization.

Solution: The company used Stratusphere FIT at the outset of the project in order to gain needed metrics for capacity planning the new infrastructure. ProfileUnity was the user virtualization solution of choice to ensure a positive transition from physical to virtual and maintain the user profiles on virtual desktops. Stratusphere UX was instrumental in fine-tuning the virtual environment and uncovering issues that had existed on physical systems but gone unreported.. The company achieved its goal of providing a consistent, reliable experience and plans to expand the infrastructure to 2,000 desktops within 18 months of the initial rollout.

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Challenge: The hospital group had deployed virtual desktop sessions on Citrix XenApp to more than 8,000 users. The image consisted of both commercial and proprietary applications running on Citrix XenApp 5.0 on Windows Server 2003. The new XenApp 6.0 servers would be implemented on Server 2008 causing incompatibilities with user profiles system wide. Upgrading the legacy Citrix Farms all at once was not an option for time and expense constraints; in addition, the legacy systems were providing rock-solid performance. The hospital group needed a solution that would seamlessly provide for one profile compatible with both so employees could log on to either environment and receive their same user persona

Solution: ProfileUnity was chosen over AppSense based on simplicity of integration and cost to enable 8,000 Citrix XenApp users to log into either XenApp 5 or XenApp 6 seamlessly (V1 to V2 profile co-existence). The product is also being used to accomplish location aware printing in their hospitals and for application management. Without a solution like ProfileUnity, the customer would have needed to upgrade all of their Citrix farms at once to XenApp 6, costing them hundreds of thousands in man-hours and new servers and updated application licenses.

Challenge: The company deployed non-persistent linked clones leveraging VMware View and ThinApp. While this architecture was successful in providing needed productivity applications to users, it left a gap for mapping printers and drives on a location-aware basis, which meant users were often left wondering which local printers were available from their desktops.

Solution: Although, they had been writing scripts to try and address the issue of local printers and drives, the company decided they needed to look at user virtualization solutions to provide localization of the desktops in a cost-efficient and automated model.

ProfileUnity was chosen over AppSense because it proved complete compatibility with the latest version of VMware ThinApp whereas AppSense failed to work. This large petroleum company is also using ProfileUnity User Virtualization for mapping printers and drives on a location aware basis. The customer further chose ProfileUnity over AppSense for its ease of use and setup and the ability to do native ‘Anytime Migrations™’ from Windows XP to Windows 7.

Challenge: Stratusphere FIT was used to assess the physical environment in preparation for capacity planning, POC and pilot of the virtual environment to support the migration to VMware View desktops running Windows 7. The company needed to seamlessly migrate users from their Windows XP PCs to Windows 7. Windows XP profiles are not compatible with Windows 7 profiles so Microsoft Roaming Profiles, and solutions that rely on roaming profiles could not handle the transition. Furthermore they needed to do this without affecting the productivity of users.

Solution: ProfileUnity was chosen to do native ‘Anytime Migrations™’ from Windows XP to Windows 7 so that the company could support both platforms until all of its applications were compatible with the new OS. The solution was also chosen to keep users flexible and ready for the next migration to Windows 8 or if they change virtual platforms.

Challenge: The company needed to seamlessly migrate users from their Windows XP PCs to Windows 7. Windows XP profiles are not compatible with Windows 7 profiles so Microsoft Roaming Profiles, and solutions that rely on roaming profiles could not handle the transition. Furthermore they needed to do this without affecting the productivity of users.

Solution: Stratusphere FIT was used to assess the physical environment in preparation for capacity planning, POC and pilot of the virtual environment to support the migration to VMware View desktops running Windows 7. ProfileUnity was chosen over AppSense and Ringcube for its ease of use and setup, the ability to offer non-persistent sessions and the ability to migration and co-exist profiles among Windows XP to Windows 7 environments. The customer calculated hundreds of thousands of dollars saved in storage, license, and admin costs by going non-persisent and automating migrations with ProfileUnity.

Challenge: The company wanted to realize the cost and management savings associated with deploying non-persistent linked clones leveraging VMware View and ThinApp. Because non-persistent VMs are destroyed at logoff, the customer needed a way to separate and save users’ personas outside of the VMware View environment.

Solution: Stratusphere FIT was used to assess the physical environment in preparation for capacity planning, POC and pilot of the virtual environment to support the migration to VMware View desktops. ProfileUnity User Virtualization was chosen over AppSense because it worked in the customer’s environment, was less admin intensive and did not create a data jail. They cited the product’s ease of use, ease of setup, and ease of management as big benefits over AppSense. The company is also using ProfileUnity’s provisioning and entitlement feature for VMware ThinApp to assign applications to specific groups and users.