On the Client Computing Team at USAA I was responsible for the transforming the user virtual desktop provisioning & onboarding experience – as well as writing the automation to power it. During my time in this role, I led the charge from 4+ week delivery to a 48-hour guarantee.
Onboarding Experience Overhaul
When I arrived on the team, I identified that there were key areas to focus on:
- Get data before the new user starts. I worked with the HR & InfoSec to get the needed data automatically published to the requests system earlier in the process
- Pre-installed software installation needed work. Don’t ask managers to keep up with ever-changing software lists - let them focus on their team. Start with a clean slate, and suggest the packages that their team uses. Much simpler.
- Provisioning Automation Improvements. I led the charge to centralize the scripts and spreadsheets into a server-hosted app, helping uptime, eliminating conflicting builds, and accelerating tooling updates. One intuitive webapp reduced errors to negligible rather than a frequent occurence.
- Farm optimization. The rapid growth of VDI wasn’t going to be sustainable if we weren’t running efficient in both our hyperconverged Software-Defined Datacenters (SDDC) and in the pod-architecture datacenters. I achieved a density increase of 12% (+8k VMs at the time, ~$2M+ saved) while at the same time returning better performance to users.
Outcomes
By the end of the overhaul, 5 people were able to focus on other work instead of VDI provisioning due to the time savings. This was a huge effort, and ultimately is what enabled the business to take on projects such as:
- 32->64 bit migration, in which 26,000 VMs in 3 months were re-built, migrating necessary software and licensing automatically
- “Workplace Flexibility” effort, in which an additional 10,000 users were migrated from physical desktops to VDI in 9 months
Provisioning time today: VM created & presented via Citrix in under an hour, software within 24 hours, completed before the user is out of New Employee Orientation.
Tools/Products Used
- PowerShell, using the VMware and Citrix snap-ins (before the C#/API clients were available)
- VMware vCenter/ESXi/NSX
- Citrix XenDesktop & XenApp
- EMC ExtremIO & ScaleIO
- Microsoft SCCM + custom internal tooling
- Lakeside Systrack
- IBM Rational Team Concert (RTC)
- JIRA