Bundestag – VDI solution

Challenge

The federal institution has a high number of employees distributed throughout the federal territory; who work in a mobile and decentralized manner. Still, the workstations must be reliably secured, isolated and managed in a self-operated environment, as confidential data is processed. Regardless of which end device the respective user uses, the availability of high graphics performance for processing demanding workloads also had to be ensured. This was because the organization also needed graphically demanding applications for processing image and video material.

The implementation was to be handled by the internal IT department, while the technicians from Sysfacts AG were to provide support with configuration optimization.

Solution

In the first step, the institution outlined organizational and technical requirements for the solution. The Sysfacts team processed this information with the project managers in a joint workshop to create a list of requirements with corresponding priorities. Based on these requirements, the consulting team collected all conceivable solutions on the market, pre-qualified them and worked the options into a decision template. Based on this pre-qualified decision template, which was heavily enriched with information, the responsible persons at the federal facility determined two conceivable solutions and thus qualified them for the evaluation phase.

To prepare for the evaluation phase, the team developed a test case catalog based on the requirements defined at the outset. In the next step, the Sysfacts engineers installed both conceivable solutions in the SF Lab and recreated the peculiarities of the customer environment. The consultants and technicians ran through the customer’s requirements in this realistic test setup and performed corresponding performance and security analyses.

After the successful evaluation phase, Sysfacts handed over the results in the form of a report and a decision document to the IT management of the federal institution. They followed the advice of our consultants and started the implementation of the solution: A Citrix XenDesktop VDI cluster with NVIDIA vGPU technology.

Lessons learned

Since the customer had no experience with 3D virtualization, the first challenge for the Sysfacts team was to understand this very special aspect of desktop virtualization. Here, the experienced consultants and technicians fell back on the SF Lab and realized knowledge transfer based on a living environment.

Based on the flexibility gained through the VDI environment, the federal institution plans a more liberal endpoint strategy for the future. Since the VDI environment is isolated in the end device, the organization wants to increasingly allow employees to access their own end devices and implement a bring-your-own-device strategy.