Despite massive budget cuts, the IT department of the Ohio Department of Alcohol and Drug Addiction Services (ODADAS) was determined to increase and improve services to end users. Over the past 2 years, it articulated and implemented a strategic plan leveraging VMware technology to transform the IT function into a driver of enterprise business-process improvements.
After virtualizing servers, the agency tackled employee desktops. In the days of individual PCs, the IT staff had been hard-pressed to keep up with the many application patches coming from vendors, such as patches for Adobe Acrobat Reader, Flash and Java. VMware View™ and VMware ThinApp™ solved that problem. ODADAS deployed View with VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) providing load balancing and Distributed Power Management (DPM) optimizing power consumption. Eighty-five of 100 desktops have been virtualized, with developers’ desktops still to go. ThinApp speeds and simplifies application virtualization.
“We increased desktop security, simplified desktop access and reduced desktop deployment times,” Matt Popovich, IT supervisor says. “What’s more, standardizing the desktop image reduced help requests dramatically.”
Application patching that used to take weeks now takes a single staff member a few hours. The technician simply updates the base image, creates a snapshot, tests and then schedules a recompose to occur for all virtual desktops during nonproduction hours.
“End users are amazed at how quickly we can deploy an application to them with ThinApp,” Rudy Rodriguez, ODADAS CIO says. “They request the app, it goes through an approval process and we can deploy it in less than 15 minutes. The user logs off, logs on, and their application is there with no visit from us.
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