There was a learning curve when it came to deploying VDI at Parkhill. The first iteration ran on two servers and NVIDIA K2s, and it served a few select teams. Encouraged by its success, Parkhill wanted to set up a larger, more advanced deployment. So it worked with IMSCAD to rebuild its Citrix infrastructure, install six additional servers, and add NVIDIA M60s.
This initial setup worked well for more than 200 users. And Parkhill’s architects and engineers could be productive remotely on a range of graphics-intensive applications, including Autodesk Revit, AutoCAD, Civil 3D, SketchUp, Bentley, and others.
Since then, there have been four iterations of Parkhill’s IT infrastructure. The firm now has 18 servers that feature a mix of NVIDIA Quadro RTX 8000 and NVIDIA L40 GPUs. As the graphics requirements that power the design workloads have increased over time, Parkhill was able to adjust GPU allocation by upgrading the vGPU 2Q profile to 4Q or 8Q. This ensured the consistency of user experience without additional infrastructure changes and downtime.
The team has found a good balance between constant upgrades and machines that work well for users. “We take user experience very seriously. We want our users to be able to be productive without worrying about system issues that cost them valuable time,” said Alan Runkles, information systems manager at Parkhill.
That focus on users is a key to Parkhill’s strategy. The team proactively keeps an eye on performance data logs to see how everything is working. This helps it catch issues before they escalate. “We have benchmarks, so we can see when something isn’t working fast enough,” said Runkles. “As soon as it falls under a certain threshold, we’ll do a vGPU upgrade, test it out, and then push it out to users.”