Case Studies
A visual of a construction site

Citrix Desktop Virtualization Brings a Construction Company Together

The Challenge:

As one of the top ten (10) general contractors in Canada, with a staff of 800+ employees, comprised of head office, field staff and site contractors working in remote offices and on active build sites, the secure sharing of corporate data and access to company applications was difficult. Add to the mix, that many build sites had limited bandwidth capabilities to access the graphic intensive files required in construction. This inability to share corporate data securely and access their applications reliably hindered their teams from working without delays and interruption.

The Solution:

Citrix desktop virtualization technology was used to place the desktop (the operating system, applications and data) in a secured location in the cloud, separating it from the physical hardware (laptops, tablets, smartphones, computers) being used to access it. Citrix product utilized:

  • NetScaler Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) v11.0 in a high availability pair
  • XenDesktop Platinum (with XenApp) version v7.8
  • Provisioning Server v7.8
  • AppDNA • XenServer v6.5

The NetScaler ADCs provide a secure gateway to the internal Citrix resources. The pair also host load balanced virtual servers for:

  • the Citrix StoreFront service (an enterprise application store that provides an interface for users to access Citrix XenDesktop and XenApp virtual desktops and applications remotely)
  • the Citrix Director (a management console that allows administrators to control and monitor XenDesktop virtual desktops and XenApp applications)
  • DNS services for name resolution
  • LDAP services for user authentication

Virtual XenDesktops were provisioned for all local and remote staff, streamed to dedicated Citrix XenServer hypervisor hosts using Citrix Provisioning services. The physical servers are equipped with nVIDIA GRID 2 cards, a graphics virtualization platform that extends the power of graphic processing unit (GPU) technology to virtual desktops and applications. This allowed the organization to provide graphic intensive resources to the staff who require it – estimators, designers, engineers, and marketing personnel.

Citrix AppDNA is application testing and management technology that detects and repairs compatibility issues that would prevent applications from migrating to virtual desktops. Using AppDNA and our experienced I.T. consulting services, we were able to place the applications optimally within the environment.

Desktop virtualization, allows our client to work seamlessly and efficiently as a team. Their wide spread staff can reliably access corporate data and applications from anywhere, securely, on any device without performance hinderance.

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