Umpqua Bank Uses ProfileUnity and Stratusphere UX for high-performance desktops for its software developers
A pilot project to improve overall desktop management and help developers get better virtual desktop performance led to many unexpected use cases and benefits for Umpqua Bank, a financial holding company based in Portland, Oregon, U.S.A. which encompasses three principal operating subsidiaries, and is the largest bank in the region with 350 branches spread over Oregon, Washington, California, Nevada and Idaho.
The IT Team at Umpqua ran into roadblocks after it virtualized its desktop infrastructure supporting its offshore software developers based in India. The infrastructure was not large, but it required more than its share of support. The standard configuration was a persistent virtual desktop running Windows 7 on Nutanix hardware. Umpqua uses Citrix Machine Creation Services (MCS) to create its virtual desktops and runs them under a VMware hypervisor. Active Directory was the primary avenue used to manage user settings and desktop configurations. The developers used Visual Studio and generated very large amounts of data -- a combination that was very poorly supported through persistent desktops.
The IT team turned to Liquidware ProfileUnity user environment management solution and Stratusphere UX user experience monitoring and diagnostics solution from Liquidware. They intended to use the new solutions to move to non-persistent virtual desktops looking for better performance. They also wanted to monitor and troubleshoot issues more proactively. In the end, however, the IT team discovered many more use cases – and benefits – than they expected, including:
- Using ProfileUnity to capture user settings and otherwise prepare migrations from physical to virtual desktops.
- Using ProfileUnity for migrations from Windows 7 to Windows 10, regardless of whether the user has a physical or virtual desktop.
- Convert all VDI users from persistent to non-persistent desktops.
- Introduce follow-me printing so users no longer have to find and log onto printers near their location. “ProfileUnity made it easy for me to manage printing, which is the hardest thing to manage in any desktop environment,” says Ferrini.
- Quickly onboard and migrate new virtual desktop users, which expanded the virtual desktop user base from 45 to more than 225 employees.