B+L opts for Microsoft WVD in Azure and Bechtle for automated deployment

B+L Baumaschinen GmbH & Co. KG – Microsoft WVD in Azure: Bechtle automates deployment.

With five sites in northern Germany, the construction machinery supplier B+L has been a reliable partner for the building industry for many decades. 140 employees sell and lease construction machinery, manage projects and repair and maintain devices. To make B+L services more efficient and agile, Bechtle implemented a WVD environment and thus laid the foundation for a flexible and dynamic future that sees the employees working on-site with their own Windows 10 desktop and enables the IT environment to flexibly and automatically scale the environment.

Project details.

Services

Cloud
Modern Workplace

Industry

Trade / Service

Manufacturer

Microsoft

Company size

< 250 employees

Challenge.

Behrens + Lüneburger Baumaschinen GmbH & Co. KG (B+L) is a reliable partner for sales, leasing and service in the North-German construction industry. To ensure all 140 employees—from planners to accountants to those in the workshop—are able to work on the road, B+L had already migrated its IT infrastructure to the Microsoft Azure platform a few years previously, making the company flexible, the IT high-performing and all systems highly available. The staff were logging in to terminal servers via a remote desktop service (RDS) and were given temporary user profiles. This single sign-on was based on multi-sessions for several employees and worked with the Microsoft server operating system, which meant that Microsoft Outlook and Teams could not be used to their full extent and individualised desktops could not be viewed. It was also quite difficult to hold video conferences.

When Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD) was officially launched at the start of 2020, B+L’s interest was piqued as the company was looking for solution that would give it and its users scalable and modern technologies.

Our employees are out and about at building sites, in the yard or in the workshop with their computers and tablets, and it’s essential not only to have access to internal IT infrastructure, but to your own desktop. WVD has made that possible And that combined with the Bechtle-developed fully-automated script, we can carry out a redeployment at any time. Our system has grown from our three original virtual hosts to seven, all of which we can activate ourselves.

Lars Löffler, Head of IT, Behrens + Lüneburger Baumaschinen (GmbH & Co.) KG

Solution.

The Bechtle experts created a concept for how to integrate WVD into B+L’s existing operations. It demonstrated which desktop computers were necessary, what the costs would be and where money could be saved. In a joint workshop with Bechtle, B+L commissioned an initial proof of concept (PoC) for 20 employees who were to trial using WVD in parallel with RDS. To this end, Bechtle set up a host pool with Windows 10 and two session hosts in Azure. FSLogix stores the program caches in the user’s respective profile on a Blob storage in Azure. Doing so creates an enclosed profile for each B+L employee and everyone taking part in the PoC always receives the same personal desktop and a enjoys a tailored user experience when they logging in. Bechtle also significantly increased graphics for video conferences.

After collecting feedback from different groups of employees, B+L and Bechtle worked closely together to define ideas and functionalities that Bechtle could integrate to boost employee productivity. Initial performance issues caused by the simultaneous activity of various services on the multi-session host were resolved by Bechtle through automation. Leveraging different scripts based on ARM, Bechtle automated the entire environment making it much more efficient.

Once the PoC had been completed successfully, B+L wanted to have the freedom to develop and/or expand their WVD themselves, which is why Bechtle developed fully-automated templates, which the B+L IT department can use at any time to carry out redeployments.

Business benefits.

The automatic scaling of session hosts based on Windows 10 lightens the load on B+L’s IT staff. The company now has seven virtual hosts at its disposal which it can activate of its own free will.

Bechtle automated everything using Azure Automation runbooks in such a way that the session hosts in the host pool automatically start up and shut down as needed. This saves B+L a considerable amount as Microsoft invoices for Azure according to runtime among other things.

Users benefit from multi-sessions as they can access their own personal desktop from any device. Today, all B+L employees are using WVD—a stable, scalable and personalised Windows 10—from anywhere.