This major car manufacturer wants to offer its users in various departments worldwide the option of ordering a desktop at the push of a button. The comdivision project team was called in to support the customer's developers due to the complexity of the undertaking as project support.
"It sounds pretty simple at first," says Jens Henning, comdivision's lead architect on this project, "rolling out a new desktop with the appropriate policies and apps for the user is not a big deal with VMware Horizon, but it gets interesting when you take the size of the company into account "
The plan is, that after the pilot phase, more than80,000 employees in the enterprise will be provided with a self-service platform with which they can order a virtual desktop for themselves in minutes at the push of a button.
Reinhard Partmann, Solution Architect at comdivision explains: "We knew that we could automate a great deal, but you cannot, for example, predict all network configurations", Partmann said and continued: "Up until now it was still easy: the user ordered a virtual desktop, the VM is started and assigned to the user ... the real work was to plan the processes very precisely; for example, that the users should have their VDI resources geographically as close as possible to their location "
In many workshops, the project team put together the processes that are necessary. For example, to automatically roll out a new tenant in MicrosoftAzure for a certain country: "The customer wanted that when an employee orders a new desktop for the first time from Turkey for example, that our system automatically checks whether there is already a tenant with Azure for this country and, if not, the order process is generated and also the next(automated) steps are carried out" Partmann says "then the networks are configured in the cloud and set up the UnifiedAccess gateway (UAG)”.
"This is the point for manual intervention" Jens Hennig goes on to say "now our customer’s network admin has to configure the connection between the on-premises networks and the cloud network. Further steps, such as establishing the connection in the Horizon on Azure ConnectionServer between tenants and the in-house Workspace ONE, then work again automatically.“
Partmann continues: "Another challenge in this project was that it was not supported to clone a Golden Master that is enrolled in VMware Workspace ONE UEM. For this reason we have developed a process where all Windows updates are installed on the Golden Master using modern management.The virtual desktop is provided for the final rollout and with the first user login, the device is finally enrolled into Workspace ONE UEM.
With the solution it will be possible to manage virtual and physical desktops uniformly using modern management and to quickly make them available to users.
Further advantages for the company are better scalability than on-premises, and the automation allows IT employees to concentrate on the important tasks in the company and require fewer software solutions for the management of the virtual desktop infrastructure.
