By Yaniv Weinberg, R&D Manager, VMware Mirage Product Engineering
Explore with us how a large U.S. public-sector organization, with more than 10,000 endpoints spread across 400 low-bandwidth connectivity sites, used Mirage to meet the following challenges:
- Migrate the more than 10,000 Windows XP endpoints to Windows 7 by April 2014, when Microsoft standard support expired. The cost of extended support for Windows XP was estimated to be around $200 per endpoint, or $2,000,000 per year.
- Quickly provision 2000 endpoints in a hardware-refresh life cycle.
- Reduce IT travel costs to support the 400 sites locally, and be able to provide similar services remotely.
The recent technical white paper VMware Mirage Implementation Case Study for a Large, Public-Sector Organization is intended to help customers, IT architects, consultants, and administrators involved in the early phases of planning, designing, and deploying Mirage-based solutions. It provides an example of a successful architecture and deployment method.
High-Level Mirage Architecture
A Mirage cluster with seven Mirage servers and a single Mirage Management server was installed in the organization’s data center, with F5 as the load-balancing solution to distribute the large number of endpoint connections to the Mirage servers. Branch reflectors were deployed in remote offices to reduce dramatically the WAN network bandwidth consumption—this reduction was accomplished by downloading base layers and app layers only once to the branch reflector on each site. Four Microsoft Windows file servers, with a total of 8 TB, provided the storage solution for backup of 400 endpoints for disaster recovery and for Mirage base layers and app layers. A single base layer was applied to twelve different types of HP desktops and laptops by using the Mirage driver library. Specific applications for departmental usage were deployed by using application layers.
A PXE solution was installed to provide bare-metal provisioning capabilities to install the 2000 endpoints needing a hardware refresh in only three weeks. Mirage 5.3 and later versions include this bare-metal provisioning solution as part of the product.
Want to learn more? Review the full white paper:
VMware Mirage Implementation Case Study for a Large, Public-Sector Organization
