Toyota Tsusho elevates usability by cloudifying VDI with Azure Virtual Desktop, aims to expand the environment to 15,000 workers by FY2026

Difficulty in scaling the performance of an on-premises VDI

Toyota Tsusho adopted VDI, which avoids data storage on end devices, to make teleworking more secure. Many security-conscious companies have been doing this for a long time. When COVID-19 made working from home mandatory from 2020 onward, the VDI trend spread rapidly. However, when VDI is deployed in an on-premises environment, resource constraints such as CPU and memory make user PCs sluggish, deterring many companies from wider adoption. Toyota Tsusho solved this problem by moving to the cloud.

Toyota Tsusho was established in 1948 as a major general trading company of the Toyota Group. Through seven businesses—metals; global parts and logistics; mobility; machinery, energy, and plant projects; chemicals and electronics; food and lifestyle; and Africa—the enterprise helps build prosperous societies on the global stage under a philosophy of ‘on site, hands on, in touch.’

“We began introducing VDI in around 2012,” says Masaaki Kodama, Group Leader in the Toyota Tsusho Infrastructure Services Group. “Our main goal was to better the security of mobile PCs used by employees. Most trading company work is performed outside the office, so data saved and carried around on PCs could leak if a PC is lost or stolen. We believed VDI would fundamentally solve this problem as data isn’t stored on end devices.”

Upon upgrading from Windows XP to Windows 7, around 100 people in the IT Strategy Department migrated to VDI. The company suddenly expanded the solution in January 2020 as a measure for working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic, creating a platform for around 3,000 employees.

“The system ran client operating systems on top of virtualized servers in an on-premises environment,” explains Kodama. “Although we were able to procure server hardware quickly to expand our teleworking operations, we needed even more for workers to use VDI comfortably. However, the system slowed down as user numbers increased, and there were no more servers to procure: we had no option but to continue with the same system.”

In January 2021, Toyota Tsusho began examining cloud computing to escape the hardships of procuring hardware and scaling resources in an on-premises environment.

“We adopted a cloud-first strategy in 2018, promoting cloudification under an eight-year plan,” says Nobuyuki Nakajima, Group Leader of the Toyota Tsusho Infrastructure Technology Group. “It was natural that we would eventually move our VDI to the cloud.”

Choosing Azure Virtual Desktop for its superior cost performance

To cloudify its VDI, Toyota Tsusho first examined the remote desktop service of a competing hyperscaler. However, according to Kodama, the cost performance of the service was mediocre. The company then examined Microsoft’s Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD), deciding to adopt the solution in April 2021.

“At Toyota Tsusho, like many companies, we use Active Directory to manage our PCs,” says Kodama. “We were using Microsoft Office for daily operations, so we expected that we would eventually turn to Microsoft for DaaS. We tested another hyperscaler to ensure the choice was justified and clearly demonstrated that Microsoft was more cost effective. Azure is highly flexible and can use many other services that are tightly integrated with PCs besides AVD, so we could easily expand our use of services.”

Toyota Tsusho defined its requirements from May to December 2021 and introduced the solution at Toyotsu Syscom, an IT company in the Toyota Tsusho Group, in January 2022. Around 700 Toyotsu Syscom employees evaluated the solution before its deployment in Toyota Tsusho in June 2022. In January 2023, Toyota Tsusho began deploying the system in other group companies.

The accompanying illustration shows the configuration of the system. The VNets used by Toyota Tsusho and other group companies are separated in an Azure tenant, with use of a VNet for management tools shared between all companies. A notable feature is that AVD uses ANF as local storage. Kodama explains the reasoning for this configuration below.

“When using VDI pools  a method that does not permanently associate a session host and user  AVD and other solutions adopt roaming user profiles, reading user profiles (the folder ‘C:\Users\{username}’) from the file server on login and writing it back to the file server on logout. When many users are accessing the file server and logging on and off at the same time, login/logout storms often occur. ANF offers blazingly quick read/write speeds, so we easily avoid this problem. Our tests showed that using ANF is on average five times faster than standard AVD storage and sometimes up to 60 times faster. We also appreciate the higher availability.”

The move to AVD has prompted a change in operations. The previous system allocated resources until a user logged out, but AVD automatically shuts down after four hours of inactivity for more efficient use of resources. As a result, the company more reliably applies security patches that require reboots.

Significantly better performance and comfort, no hardware failures

So, how has moving to AVD benefited Toyota Tsusho?

“Our on-premises VDI was very slow; moving to AVD has made operations much faster,” says Nakajima. “We used to monitor the CPU and memory utilization of each server, live-migrating virtual machines from servers under heavy load to underutilized servers. However, it was still difficult to achieve our desired performance due to system-wide resource constraints. Users became fed up and just expected the sluggishness, but after switching to AVD, the system’s much more usable than before.”

“The benefits of AVD quickly spread among users through word of mouth,” says Ayumi Kubota, whose work in the Toyota Tsusho Infrastructure Services Group involves internal briefings and help desk management. “Its ease of use is virtually identical to an on-premises VDI, and the ability to smoothly migrate users from the previous environment has also been a tremendous benefit. We held an internal briefing because the initial access screen is a little different, but there were hardly any questions.”

The elimination of server hardware failures has been another great advantage.

“For our on-premises VDI, we used HCI and N+1 redundancy to minimize the expense of spare machines, but hardware failed more often than expected, and we would spend an entire day on replacement,” says Nobutaka Shibui of the Toyota Tsusho Infrastructure Services Group. “In addition, the system had to operate in fallback mode from the time of failure until the replacement was completed, which further deteriorated performance. With AVD, we no longer have to deal with these kinds of failures.”

Toyota Tsusho currently uses Windows 10 with AVD but has already started a project to transition to Windows 11. According to Shibui, another advantage of AVD over on-premises VDI is the ease with which two operating systems can run in parallel.

“We will expand the system to group companies in the future,” says Kodama. “By the end of fiscal year 2026, we expect to have deployed the solution to about 40 of our 70 group companies in Japan, which is around 15,000 users.” Toyota Tsusho isn’t currently aiming to introduce the system at all group companies because of a circumstance typical of trading companies: operating in countries and regions with vulnerable communication environments requiring fat clients.

“Rather than forcing all group companies to use DaaS, we believe we must drive deployment based on our understanding of users and job types,” explains Kodama. “Using AVD means we don’t need to procure hardware, so it’s easy to provide an environment at a time tailored to the needs of group companies. We’ll take time to consider the best approach for fiscal year 2027 and beyond.”