4-page Case Study - Posted 3/27/2009

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Fairfax County Public Schools

School District Speeds Deployment, Boosts Application Access with virtualization

IT staff at Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS), a large district with 90,000 computers, had to manage and update many separate disk images. This complexity led to the deferral of most application deployment until hardware upgrades were done, which reduced application availability to teachers. At times, applications were deployed singly, adding to the maintenance complexity. Deployment could take four weeks, and then, teachers needed transition time. With Microsoft® Application Virtualization version 4.5, IT staff can easily deploy images and applications, while maintaining 50 percent fewer images. IT staff can perform just-in-time application deployment dynamically, whenever they need to. Upgrades are less stressful for teachers because older application versions remain available to them. Teachers and students can access the applications they need from many more computers than before.

Situation

Technology support specialists in Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) support 90,000 computers across approximately 240 sites. Their goal, according to Chris Lewis, Manager of the Desktop Management Team at FCPS, is to provide the best support possible to aid the instructional process. This support includes ensuring that teachers and students have access to the applications they need, whenever and wherever they need them. Accomplishing this in such a large, dispersed environment can be extremely challenging.

FCPS IT Desktop Management Team staff maintains separate disk images for each of its instructional programs. “We can’t always ensure that teachers and students have the applications they need because of the difficulty involved in managing and updating so many static images,” Lewis says. “With each school’s IT staff also customizing images, and with images tied to the hardware platforms they run on, we are experiencing image explosion.” Because of this difficulty, FCPS IT staff and the instructional technology specialists typically wait until their standard desktop and portable computer providers, Dell and HP, upgrade hardware. Application deployment could take as long as four weeks—with two weeks needed to package and test software for delivery, and two weeks to deploy it. If teachers needed a new application sooner for instruction, they had to wait until a technology support specialist was available to do desk-side visits and install the application. Such one-off deployments resulted in more complexity, requiring IT to support many diverse applications and image configurations.

IT staff also grappled with identifying just the right timing to phase out older applications in favor of deploying and installing new or upgraded ones. Because phasing in a new application entails also phasing out existing applications, it was difficult to provide enough time ahead of the transition date for teachers to learn and feel comfortable with new applications.

In addition, FCPS has a largely decentralized environment, where school principals are empowered to make decisions about which applications they license. Although all applications go through an IT assessment process, installing applications occasionally results in compatibility issues. “We can’t regression test against all the conceivable desktop permutations and combinations. It’s just not feasible,” Lewis says. "Even with standard application deployments, application conflicts sometimes cause reliability problems for teachers and students, requiring more visits by IT to resolve them."

FCPS is also challenged by tight classroom space. In the past, teachers could use classroom computers during their planning periods to do work related to their classes. Now, because the schools are densely populated, classrooms are often occupied with students all day, which means teachers need to find other places to work. If they can’t find a computer with the applications they need, they can’t get their work done as efficiently.

This lack of application mobility also affects students who need to access applications after school. They have to rely on their classrooms being open and staffed in order to use their applications—or wait until the next school day to do their work.

“We need a more dynamic IT environment, where teachers and students can access their applications from any machine in the school, and IT can easily deploy and maintain images and applications,” Lewis notes.

Solution

Several years ago, Lewis and members of FCPS IT staff attended a Microsoft Management Summit where they saw a demo of SoftGrid®, now Microsoft® Application Virtualization (App-V) version 4.5. “We realized [App-V] could have a significant impact on the way FCPS supports our instructional process,” Lewis says. “Not only could it dramatically help our teachers and students, it could also provide great benefits for IT staff. It’s truly a paradigm shift.” 

[Microsoft Application Virtualization] enables us to streamline application delivery, and provide much greater application mobility and reliability for teachers and students. Chris Lewis Manager, Desktop Management Team, Fairfax County Public Schools

Using App-V, FCPS transforms applications into centrally managed virtualized services, resulting in dynamic delivery of software that is never installed, rarely causes conflicts, and minimizes tedious application compatibility testing. Users and their application environments are no longer machine-specific, and the machines themselves are no longer user-specific.

Applications are virtualized with the App-V Sequencer, an easy-to-use wizard-based tool that packages applications for real-time streaming. The App-V Sequencer monitors and records all installation and setup processes for an application, and creates files that contain all the necessary information for an application to run in a virtual environment on target computers. After an application is sequenced, it can be streamed to target computers. Target computers can also run the virtual application by downloading the contents of the virtual application package and running the application locally.

Microsoft Application Virtualization is available as part of Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP), a desktop solution that helps Software Assurance customers reduce application deployment costs, enable delivery of applications as services, and better manage and control enterprise-wide desktop environments.

Benefits

FCPS has realized impressive results since implementing Microsoft Application Virtualization. “It enables us to streamline application delivery, and provide much greater application mobility and reliability for teachers and students,” says Lewis. “There aren’t many solutions that equally benefit both the end user and the IT sides of the enterprise. Microsoft Application Virtualization is truly unique.”

Application Deployment Reduced from Four Weeks to One Day

Deployment is much faster. “It’s very easy for IT staff to dynamically deliver applications now,” Lewis says. “The beauty of application virtualization is that we have tremendous flexibility in terms of when we deploy applications. We’re not tied to image changes.”

Lewis adds, “Every application I’ve sequenced with Microsoft Application Virtualization is 200 percent easier than it was with the old-school packaging method. With App-V Sequencer, I can get an application ready for testing much easier, and I only have to test it against the Windows® base image. I don’t have to test it against other applications because I know they won’t conflict. Delivering applications is just a matter of dragging and dropping users into Active Directory® groups, and asking them to log on to their computers. Everything is much faster and much more reliable for the users.” Instead of taking four weeks to deploy applications, FCPS IT staff can do just-in-time application deployment where the entire process—from sequencing to delivery—takes as little as one day. In fact, it took FCPS IT staff less than 30 days to virtualize 100 applications.

Stress of Application Transition Reduced for Teachers

IT staff can virtualize a new application version and have it run side-by-side with an older version on the same machine, without any conflicts. “It gives us a lot of flexibility in terms of training and transitioning to new applications. We don’t need a hard date for transitions,” Lewis explains. “It’s a much lower-stress decision because there is no anxiety about what happens if a teacher doesn’t fully understand how to use the upgraded or new application—[there is] still the option of backward compatibility. We can ease users into the upgrade, and when they’re ready, we just uncheck the ‘enabled’ box and the older application is no longer there.”

Application Mobility Provides Increased Flexibility and Convenience for Users

Because applications are now tied to people, rather than to specific machines, FCPS has a lot of flexibility in terms of where applications are accessed. Students who need to use applications after school can easily access them from the media center, which is always open after school; they don’t need to worry about whether their classrooms will be available. In addition, teachers can work from any computer in any open room during their planning periods. “Our principals, who are ultimately responsible for scheduling classroom use, can schedule classrooms freely and without the technology constraints previously put in place because applications were tied to specific computers rather than to the users,” Lewis says.

Application mobility also makes it easier for teachers who transfer to new schools. “By centralizing application management, and tying applications to users, we can ensure that teachers will be able to access the applications they need from day one,” Lewis says.

Images Reduced by 50 Percent; IT Maintenance Simplified 

Using Microsoft Application Virtualization, FCPS can dramatically reduce the number of images it maintains. Since applications are no longer included in most images, IT staff at the high school that is using virtualized applications was able to cut the number of images from 70 to 35.

Lewis’s team maintains approximately 50 images for each of the seven hardware platforms used throughout the district. “If I can roll that back to a base image, I can significantly reduce the overhead of what I keep on the servers and what I have to update,” he says. In the past, his team updated images on a quarterly basis. Now, it will be able to update images with patches and security updates on a monthly basis. “With fewer images to maintain, we can keep them more current with the same IT staff resources,” Lewis notes. This will also help shorten the time to transition to new hardware platforms because, with only a few images, much less testing needs to be done.

“I also anticipate that when we get ready to deploy Windows Vista®, we’ll be able to do so more quickly because we’ll only have to deliver base images, and can add the virtualized applications on top of them,” Lewis adds.

Broader User Access to Applications

FCPS uses a standard list of applications for core instruction; however, it also has a wide variety of supplemental software that teachers use for remediation. Often teachers don’t know what other teachers in the district are using for remediation. Because of decentralization and one-off deployments, Lewis’s team was having trouble coming up a list of applications that teachers could view. “By bringing applications into a central fold, we can publish all that information and make it available to teachers. This enables us to provide a level of communication that can be very difficult in an enterprise of our size,” Lewis says.

Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack
To learn how Microsoft Application Virtualization and the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack for Software Assurance can help you, please visit
www.windowsvista.com/optimizeddesktop  

For More Information

For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:
www.microsoft.com

For more information about Fairfax County Public Schools products and services, call or visit the Web site at:
www.fcps.edu