Committee meeting - June 2, 2022

Sarah McKone  
Secretary to the Committee     
June 2, 2022 
    
Present:  Andrew McAlorum, Bill Baer, Don Duff-McCracken,Erick Engelke, Greg Parks, Jason Testart, Lori Paniak, Nick Springate, Paul Miskovsky, Trevor Bain

Guests: Chris Calzonetti, Dave Hinton, Jim Johnston, Matthew Verlis 

Regrets: Adam Savage, Greg Smith, Pam Fluttert, Pratik Patel, Robyn Landers, Steven Bourque 


Agenda   

  1. Presentation: An overview of AVD/VDI/RDP [10 min.]

  2. Presentation: TR UPS options [15 min.] 

  3. Approval of the minutes from Thursday, April 7, 2022 [5 min.] 

  4. Hybrid meeting tech. For employees [15 min.]

  5. Security of workstations and supported OS's [10 min.] 

  6. Other business and roundtable discussion – all [20 min.] 

  7. Next CTSC Meeting [Will be held Thursday, June 16, at 1:30 p.m.] 

Presentation: An overview of AVD/VDI/RDP (Dave Hinton) 

  • Review presentation slides for additional details.  

  • Local school board have two AVD clients; light weight office productivity, and one for heavier software. 

  • An AVD for students could be preloaded with specific applications as students log in. 

  • If there is a need for a staff AVD this can be discussed depending on the requirements. There are other solutions for staff (ex.RDP) that are cheaper and easier to maintain.  

  • AVD may not meet all needs and VDI may be necessary for some instances.  

  • AVD is most effective when utilized by larger groups, particularly in terms of cost. 

  • Dave to confirm if Zoom and Teams are supported.  

  • AHS has moved to AVD and has found it significantly easier to offer support. 

  • CAL’s are complicated when there are a set number of licenses and multiple groups utilizing these licenses. Dave to confirm information about what would need to be purchased 

  • Desire to expand VDI for staff should be directed to Steve. 

  • Andrew to connect with Steve about a working group. Don and Bill are interested in being a part of this. 

Presentation: TR UPS options (Matthew Verlis) 

  • Are there any one-time costs associated with option 2? Potentially if UPS hardware has previously failed. 

  • Additional options should be investigated before a decision is made.  

  • Better power and reliability on campus 

  • There is a proposal from the sustainability office to buy a million-dollar battery, it could reduce electricity costs and act as a solution for this. These batteries have 10-year warranties. 

  • There is a Green IT component to this; lead for batteries, etc. 

Approval of the minutes of the previous meeting  

  • The previous meeting’s minutes were accepted as distributed.  

Wireless connectivity and Data Centre outage (Matthew Verlis) 

Comments and discussions 

  • Network team started investigating around 8:00am and began rebooting. The reboot and back up was not completed until closer to 9:00am.  

  • It appears a software failure took out two switch heads and knocked out the alert VM and mailing lists. 

  • Communication emails to distribution lists and teams' messages were sent around 9:00am. 

  • Hundreds of servers needed to be rebooted and they could not all be rebooted at once. Most services were restored by noon. In the afternoon it was identified that mailman lists were not working, this was restored, and queued emails were sent. 

  • TAC is investigating the cause but most of the logs are unavailable due to the reboot.  

  • The recommendation is to update the firmware, which is scheduled around the winter break. 

  • There are central sys-logs, but these stopped at the time interfaces on switches went down. 

Hybrid meeting tech. for employees (Andrew McAlorum) 

Comments and discussions 

  • Investigating hybrid meeting support for employees 

  • Creating a bookable resource that staff can utilize when they need a space the supports hybrid meetings.  

  • Owls are a good solution for smaller environments. They do require good lighting, and the ventilation can pose significant mic feedback.  

  • Large smart TV has been a positive solution for a e-whiteboard environment. 

Security workstations and supported OS’s (Erick Engelke) 

  • To be discussed at future CTSC meeting