A prominent automotive manufacturer aimed to offer its employees – in various departments globally – the ability to request a desktop at the push of a button. To navigate the complexity of this endeavor, the comdivision team was enlisted for support, and worked alongside the customer's developers throughout the project.
"At first glance, providing a new desktop with the appropriate policies and apps for the user is not a significant challenge – especially with VMware Horizon“ stated Jens Hennig, comdivision's lead architect for this project. However, the project took on a new level of interest due to the company's size.
The objective was to make a self-service platform available to over 80,000 corporate employees after the pilot phase, which would enable them to order a personal virtual desktop within just a few minutes.
Reinhard Partmann, Solution Architect at comdivision, recognized that a great deal could be automated, yet, for example, planning all network configurations in advance is not feasible. He contended that “previously, it was straightforward; a user ordered a virtual desktop, the VM starts, and it is assigned to the user. The core effort involved meticulously planning the processes, such as ensuring that users' VDI resources are as geographically proximate to their location as possible."
Throughout numerous workshops, the project team devised processes to automatically establish a new tenant on Microsoft Azure for a specific country. "The customer desired that when an employee from Turkey orders a new desktop for the first time, our system automatically verifies the existence of an Azure tenant for that country. If absent, the ordering process is initiated, and subsequent steps - where feasible - are automated," explained Partmann. As the networks in the cloud wereconfigured, Unified Access Gateways (UAG) were established.
This juncture necessitatde manual intervention. Hennig asserted that "the customer's network administrator must configure the connectivity between the on-premises networks and the cloud network. Subsequent steps, like linking tenants with the in-house Workspace ONE on the Horizon on Azure server, are once more subject to automation."
A notable challenge in this project was the unsupported cloning of a Golden Master enrolled in VMware Workspace ONE UEM. As a solution, we formulated a process wherein all Windows updates are installed on the Golden Master through modern management. For the final rollout, the virtual desktop is provisioned for the user, and upon the initial user login, the device is eventually enrolled in Workspace ONE UEM.
The solution now facilitates the uniform management and swift provision of both virtual and physical desktops to users. Additional advantages for the company include enhanced scalability over on-premises solutions. Through automation, IT personnel can concentrate on critical company tasks – reducing the need for various software solutions to manage the virtual desktop infrastructure.
