300 desktop sessions without a per-seat licence, and a login time under 20 seconds
VDI — open source / self-hosted
Where they started
Staff used laptops with local data, and the firm needed centralised control over information without a per-seat virtual desktop licence that would have doubled the project cost.
The problem, precisely
Desktop performance complaints kill VDI projects. Login storms and profile sprawl had to be solved before rollout, not after.
What we did
Instrumented login time from the first pilot and treated it as the only acceptance metric that matters, then tuned storage and session brokering until it held under a simulated morning rush.
Delivered
- Golden image pipeline with versioned images and a tested rollback
- Session brokering HA behind a VIP, surviving a node loss
- Profile and data redirection onto clustered storage, no local data on endpoints
- Login-storm test: 180 concurrent sessions started within a defined window
- Endpoint strategy for the devices staff kept, with documented data rules
Technologies used
Measured result
Every number below was measured and reported to the customer. Where we do not have a measured figure, the entry is a fact rather than a percentage — we would rather be precise than impressive.
- 17s p95 login time under simulated login storm
- 180 concurrent sessions supported on 4 nodes
- 0 per-seat virtual desktop licences purchased
- 100% of user data relocated to controlled storage
Design VDI against the login storm, not the average day. Almost every VDI failure is storage saturation in the first fifteen minutes of the morning.