Last week I had the privilege of doing a joint webinar with one of our first VDI customers, Cardinal Health. I was joined by Justin Hooper, Director of Windows Systems at Cardinal Health. Cardinal Health is the largest worldwide provider of health care solutions, with over 40,000 employees. They are global in nature and are recognized by Fortune Magazine as one of America’s Most Admired Companies.

Cardinal Health was an early adopter of VDI and selected VDI from VMware to support and deliver the desktop infrastructure of two mission critical call centers. At the time, there still was not a lot of information available regarding the architectural choices and deployment practices of VDI based solutions. Justin and his team did a tremendous job of being innovative in order to design a solution that meets the business requirements of Cardinal Health. One of the most innovative things I
feel they accomplished was in how they executed their client side strategy. After evaluating different alternatives from PC’s to thin clients.

They decided to go with low-end PC’s. Because VDI was new at the time, Justin’s team had to create their own custom image. The image is PXE booted from the network by each of the client end points. In essence this enabled them to create their own low cost unmanaged client end point. When a device is powered on it downloads its image from the network. Once the boot process is complete, the user is given a chooser created by Justin’s team for selecting the environment they need. Once the user has made their selection, a connection is established to their hosted virtual desktop.

Simple, clean and affective. This client side approach is also an effective way for organizations to move to a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure today, while still leveraging the existing investment in desktop hardware they might have. In addition, it provides a clean and effective migration path to adopting alternative client devices such as thin clients, once the PC investment has depreciated. In this webinar Justin shares with us the architectural details and lessons learned from their
deployment. The webinar can be found at the following location, Select recorded webinars and its listed on page 2:

Cardinal Health’s Call Center PC Virtualization with VMware Virtual Desktop Infrastructure VDI