Serving equipment leasing needs across Canada, National Leasing’s IT department is responsible for supporting nearly 100 remote users, in addition to some 300 employees at the Winnipeg headquarters. Previously connected via a slower-than-desirable VPN, remote users had to bring in or send their systems to HQ for maintenance and upgrades, resulting in frustrated users and a drain on productivity. Five years ago the company transitioned to a VMware® View™ virtualized desktop infrastructure to address these issues.
“Initially we recycled some old desktops,” said Dominic Slack, National Leasing Network Support Analyst. “There were lots of headaches doing that so we wanted to find something more compact that would leave more desk space for the user.”
Unfortunately, the company’s initial scaled-down choice turned out to be a poor match for the company’s needs, said Slack. Reliability was inconsistent and employees had a lot of complaints.
In addition to better serving its remote employees, National Leasing had implemented virtualization with the goal of supporting a more robust disaster recovery plan.
“Our risk department manager determined that for business continuity purposes we needed to have a few representatives from every department able to continue working via a virtual machine in the event of a system shut down,” said Slack.
Clearly, inconsistently reliable performance was not an option to support this important objective, while malfunctioning hardware continued to hamper productivity and burden IT resources.