Case Study: Athabasca University

Managing 400 XenDesktops on vSphere

Athabasca University, serving 38,000 students in 84 countries worldwide by offering online courses, knows the importance of having an infrastructure that is running problem free—their students depend on having access to courses at any time since “learning at your pace” is one of the advantages of attending Athabasca. With 1,200 faculty and staff members supporting these students, access to the information that the staff needs is just as critical. So when Kevin Richards, PC Systems Analyst at Athabasca, set out to deploy a VDI solution, he knew a management tool would be an important element in its success.

Kevin’s VDI deployment includes 10 VMware ESX servers running 70 virtualized servers and 400 XenDesktops. Getting detailed metrics and visibility into all of these objects was imperative and some of his initial challenges were to dig down and find specific performance metrics such as disk access and network bandwidth. This led him to trial and eventually purchase the Xangati VDI Dashboard.

“I looked at other solutions, which provided a high-level overview, but Xangati gives that overview and much more detail,” said Kevin. “Xangati gives you performance metrics on absolutely anything you would need to know about your virtual environment.”

The Xangati VDI Dashboard gives Kevin an overall health score of his VDI by leveraging its unique performance health engine but also allows him to get granular details such as tracking which datastore’s high latency is affecting user logins, zooming inside the desktop VM to see what processes are overrunning memory, and recording which specific hypervisor is over-run by “boot storms.”

Kevin has used Xangati to drill down into specific desktop sessions that are experiencing issues and quickly identify the problem. For instance, one XenDesktop in particular was very slow to respond. With Xangati, he was able to easily see that the network that particular machine was utilizing was experiencing the issue, so instead of troubleshooting with the end user, the server or anything else, he knew the problem was with the network and was easily able to resolve it.

With Xangati helping manage the VDI, Kevin, the Athabasca faculty and staff, and the university’s students are all achieving their goals.