Situated in the east of Shizuoka Prefecture, Fuji City has long been a prosperous paper milling and industrial center. The Fuji City Office provides support services to the city’s 244,258 inhabitants. Its employees comprise 3,000 people including temporary staff and members of the city council. It also oversees about 130 facilities including its own municipal offices, elementary schools, urban development centers, welfare centers and hospitals.

The Challenge: Making Server Administration More Efficient

The Fuji City Office has been actively engaged in the implementation of IT systems, with the decision to provide each employee with their own terminal and the introduction of Citrix Presentation Server™ to centralize administration coming as early as 2001.

“At the time, the entire city office had only three system administrators, and it only has four today. It would have been extremely difficult to manage more than 1,000 terminals with so few people. That’s why we implemented Presentation Server to alleviate the potentially huge amount of maintenance,” explained Yasunobu Fukasawa, head of Systems Development in the Information Policy Section of the Fuji City Office’s General Affairs Division. Without Presentation Server, the city would never have been able to realize its policy of one PC per person. The Fuji City Office began with 480 licenses, went about setting up thin-client computers, and eventually grew to 1,460 simultaneously connected licenses, an environment it has utilized over a period of six years.

Although the Presentation Server environment was stable, Fuji City’s IT infrastructure was basically acquired on lease. With the lease agreement due to terminate in 2007, the city began to consider its future system environment options.

Fukasawa recalled, “We had used the system for about six years and achieved almost everything we had set out to do. We were resolute in our decision to keep using Presentation Server because it had clearly enabled us to reduce administrative hassles.” While there were no doubts regarding continued use of the Citrix solution, several challenges existed. One was the amount of time required for users to log in due to the bloated user profiles resulting from the extended use of a Windows® environment. This problem extended to the servers responsible for running published applications, leading to some operating instability from considerable years of use. In turn, those published applications used 78 servers, so reducing the maintenance work required to be performed on multiple servers was also a major issue.

Just as Fukasawa was considering alternatives for a new IT environment in the autumn of 2006, he came across some literature on Citrix Provisioning Server™ for Datacenters written by an IT expert. “I thought that by combining Presentation Server and Provisioning Server, we could curtail our overall system administration costs and efforts.”

Implementing Citrix Provisioning Server for Datacenters

The Fuji City Office adopted Citrix Provisioning Server for Datacenters with the aims of shortening logon times on user desktops, ensuring the stable operation of servers dedicated to published desktops and applications, and achieving further reductions in maintenance man hours.

Provisioning Server comprehensively manages a combination of network-connected operating systems and applications as boot images, which are streamed to the servers for use. By streaming the boot image to the Citrix servers, the solution facilitates a reduction in server maintenance hours.

The city commenced operation of its new IT environment in January 2008. In addition to the novel deployment of Citrix Provisioning Server, Fuji City enhanced its servers and network bandwidth, thereby realizing a marked improvement in its system environment.

The four Provisioning Servers are connected to 12-terabyte SAN storage and share the workload. At the start of each day, the servers stream all of the boot images to the 19 Citrix servers for published applications and 64 servers for published desktops, one of the tasks they manage with ease.

Fuji City Office also upgraded Presentation Server to a later version. The improvements in performance of multimedia applications and the use of partitioned environments have paved the way for virtually all applications to run on Presentation Server.

Maintain Server Environment Performance and Dramatically Enhance Manageability

Fukasawa said, “Before long, the Windows OS of desktop environments becomes unstable due to users installing their own software. Provisioning Server refreshes the OS images every morning, allowing us to maintain the responsiveness of default OS installations.”

Daily manageability has also improved immensely. Installing an OS security patch, for instance, used to require administration of each server. Now, with Provisioning Server, one set of published application boot images and one set of published desktop boot images are administered. These are streamed to the appropriate servers. All of the servers in that group use the same boot image, enabling consistent, safe and stable operation. The IT staff only needs to maintain the two boot image sets.

The deployment of the new environment has resulted in positive feedback, with users noting that login time to the Citrix environment has become faster, providing them with a patently faster application experience than was previously possible.

Future Plans

Speaking about Fuji City’s plans for the future, Fukasawa said, “We think that the combination of two Citrix products will help us to achieve even more-effective use in the future, as well. It is possible to separately carry out maintenance on a running server OS and then distribute the boot image that has undergone maintenance when next streaming. Another function which we haven’t yet attempted is the effective application of server resources by streaming boot images to suit the intended uses. This involves streaming the published application server boot image for business during the day and then partially switching to stream a back-up server boot image at night.”

When it comes to adopting products intended for long-term use, it is reassuring to have the leeway that will afford greater convenience and manageability in the future. Fuji City Office is scheduled to merge with the adjoining town of Fujikawa on November 1, 2008. The applications used on general-purpose equipment in Fujikawa are also expected to be delivered to thin clients using Citrix products. Fujisawa also reported that the city office is eyeing the application of a Citrix XenServer™ virtual environment. The city is also considering the combined use of Presentation Server and server virtualization technology for “as-is” migration of running machines as a way to shorten operating downtime.

Meanwhile, the use of Citrix Access Gateway™ functionality, included in Presentation Server, will open the way to new IT system designs by providing a safe environment to use applications from home or outside the office, and linking the use of smart cards for facility access administration and PC environments.

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