Hammersmith & Fulham Council is using Colt’s Workspace as a Service to support greater than 2,000 virtual desktop users in line with VMware’s Horizon Suite.

As portion of a protracted-standing requirement to cut back physical estate, Hammersmith & Fulham Council has adopted a wise working strategy supported by technology from Colt.

Desktop virtualisation is getting used to supply flexibility to permit staff to work from any of the council’s sites.

As section of the roll-out, the council is migrating from a legacy Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 and Citrix desktop environment to Windows 7 accessed through thin client devices.

Howell Huws, head of commercial technology at Hammersmith & Fulham Council, said a key driver was to update the desktop environment to Windows 7 and Office 2010, including improving mobility and personalisation. 

“We wanted users for you to go surfing to any machine from anywhere and feature the identical experience,” he said.

The council provides staff with thin client devices to access the Windows 7 environment, which Huws said helps to handle the fairway agenda since the thin clients use a fifth of the ability of the PCs they replace.

The council previously used PCs to connect with its Citrix environment. These not just consumed more power than the skinny client devices, but additionally took longer in addition up he said: “Our old PCs would take three-and-a-half minutes as well up. We will be able to now begin in 43 seconds.”

The thin clients also offer USB security control, which was very unlikely within the previous PC setup.

The council has deployed Wyse and Cisco thin client desktop devices and Wyse thin client laptops. “The thin client laptops are very hot. Greater than 1/2 the [desktop] estate is predicated on thin client laptops. They’re lighter and there’s far less to head wrong,” said Huws.

The devices also slot in with the accommodation policy of Kensington town hall.

Altogether, the council has 2,700-3,000 thin client users, with 300 running Wyse laptops.