“The project was delivered in an incredibly ambitious timeline. Triangle’s team placed an early emphasis on conducting a comprehensive assessment of the existing environment, dependencies, and performance requirements. By holding off on rushing into the implementation phase and expending additional effort on good planning and governance at the start, we ultimately delivered a superior solution on time, within budget and with no downtime to the business."
With more than 1,100 corporate and franchise locations in Europe using Horizon VDI desktops daily, Hertz maintains one of the largest European footprints of any automotive rental company. To reduce the costs and improve efficiencies of its data infrastructure on the continent, the company decided to migrate its multiple on-premise data centres into a cloud environment.
Hertz's seasonal demands also meant the centrally managed solution needed to be seamless in its capability to quickly burst beyond the initial desktop deployment figures as required.
Given Triangle's history as a trusted solutions and services provider for Hertz, they were the obvious choice to deliver a successful migration. The project’s scale, tight timelines and the need to enhance the end user's experience demanded an extremely high level of expertise and collaboration.
Hertz chose VMC on AWS as the data centre solution. Tasked with supporting more than 3,000 Horizon desktop users across a wide range of locations in Europe, VMware Cloud on AWS brings VMware’s enterprise-class SDDC software to the AWS Cloud with optimised access to AWS services.
VMware Cloud on AWS is based on the VMware by Broadcom Cloud Foundation and integrates VMware’s leading products for computing, storage, and network virtualization – vSphere, vSAN, and NSX – as well as vCenter Server management capabilities.
Hertz’s design requirements mandated a dual-site configuration, ensuring Horizon desktop services were accessible across two AWS regions in Europe. This active/active configuration with native AWS load balancing directs users to the most appropriate location for access to their Hertz desktop services.
The VMware Horizon Cloud Pod Architecture delivers disaster recovery capability for each AWS region in the event of a region failure. All needed data is asynchronously replicated between the regions using native AWS storage services. Global load balancing ensures users are routed to available desktop services in the event of a region failure.
The Horizon EC2 Federated architecture tackles many of these design aspects. This architecture operates the Horizon Management Plane through AWS EC2 instances within the customer VPC, while all associated Horizon desktop workloads run from the connected VMC on AWS SDDC.
Triangle’s cloud services experts reconfigured its own project management processes to facilitate adequate collaboration and support across more than two months of intense development. This included a higher frequency of project meetings and migration workshops than what is typically used for a standard data centre migration.
With expertise across all migration modules and the ability to work through different time zones, Triangle was able to deliver its VMware by Broadcom Cloud on AWS services in record time.
“Despite the aggressive timeline and parallel workflows required to meet our migration deadline, Triangle’s governance framework made sure that all parties knew exactly what processes were in-progress at any given time, as well as whether any processes were moving behind schedule. Workflow issues and process augmentations were addressed very quickly to make sure the project was able to meet our firm deadline.”
Triangle’s cloud services & VDI team successfully guided Hertz to an on-time migration of all end-user virtual desktops from on-premise managed data centres and into a VMware by Broadcom Cloud on AWS environment. By completing this migration, Hertz also achieved a number of benefits associated with the VMware by Broadcom Cloud on AWS.
With geographically split data storage, Hertz’s data infrastructure now enjoys a much higher level of geographical resilience as compared to its previous on-prem infrastructure. The cloud environment provides much better visibility into the storage environment, and VMware by Broadcom Advanced Monitoring will help the Hertz IT team ensure better system performance for all of its desktop users.
Thanks to Triangle’s significant time investment in planning the migration, Hertz was also able to utilise a broader range of advanced features offered by the Horizon product set.
