Project Type
System Design and Deploy
Customer Type
Federal
Environment Type
Data Center
- Challenge -
The COVID19 global pandemic had forced our customer to triple their highly secure VDI footprint from 5,000 users to 15,000 users worldwide to accommodate the surge of telework demand. With dedicated hardware, our customer quickly required a new virtual infrastructure to be designed, procured, deployed and integrated in order to meet the very high demand for telework capability.
- Requirement -
Immediately design, deploy and integrate a highly-available virtual hosting infrastructure capable of supporting a Citrix virtual desktop environment with a global user footprint of 15,000 users. The design should provide infrastructure high availability between our two primary datacenters and DR capability with a third datacenter. The storage environment should provide FIPS 140-2 Data at rest encryption and all secure communications should be firewalled from the internal network.
- Solution -
In coordination with Jtek Data Systems and WWT, our enterprise architect and engineering team proposed a scalable VMware centric, hyperconverged (HCI) solution. The design would utilize All Flash (E560F) DELL VXrails and Cisco Nexus switching deployed in a bowtie spine/leaf topology at each of the three datacenters. All subnets would terminate at a Palo Alto Firewall pair at each site and all inbound and outbound traffic would be enclaved. Encryption would utilize a site-redundant HA Thales DSM pair.
Sites 2 and 3 were designed identically HA is achieved by Citrix deployment groups residing at the two primary datacenters and DR is accommodated by F5 Load GTM load balancing.
- Results -
Within 28 days of submitting the order, our customer accepted delivery of the DELL VXrails, Thales DSM, and Cisco Nexus switching hardware at the first datacenter. With the support of WWT, Dell, and Thales: Within 7 days after hardware delivery to the datacenter our architect and engineers racked, stacked, cabled, and configured two 30-node VXrail clusters with redundant cisco networking and integrated the Thales DSM for Data at Rest Encryption.
This allowed for the VDI team to migrate their Citrix solution onto the new infrastructure and serve desktops for the 15,000 Users. All three sites were deployed in 100 days with fully functional HA and DR capability
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