Dunaway reduces VDI costs 40% and boosts Horizon

With more than 370 employees across eight offices, the company delivers Survey, Civil and Structural Engineering, Planning + Landscape Architecture, and Construction Inspection Services (CIS), in addition to Environmental and Geographic Information Systems (GIS), SUE (Subsurface Utility Engineering), and ROW (Right-of-Way) services.

When instability in its Citrix VDI environment began affecting billable hours and project deadlines, this Texas-based engineering firm rethought its approach. After validating Omnissa Horizon® in a proof of concept with 20 engineers, Dunaway migrated in just 10 weeks, moving to a more stable, resilient architecture. Average virtual machine (VM) launch times dropped from nearly a minute to 12 seconds, provisioning became 25% faster, and the team reduced licensing costs by approximately 40% while standing up two resilient on-premises pods. Now Dunaway’s engineers spend more time designing and generating revenue, and less time waiting on technology.

Engineering the future of Texas

For 70 years, Dunaway has partnered with public and private organizations to design the infrastructure that keeps Texas moving—from transportation networks to community developments. Its multidisciplinary teams collaborate across its eight offices on complex, design-heavy projects that demand precision and speed.

As the firm grows, it must deliver projects on time, support teams across locations, and attract top engineering talent. To do that, Dunaway needs technology that keeps pace with its designers and engineers.

Instability puts deadlines and revenue at risk

Dunaway’s production teams rely on virtual desktops to work on large, data-intensive design files—from Revit models to CAD drawings and transportation inspections. As part of a broader effort to support remote employees, retain top talent, and centralize data across its Texas offices, the firm had already moved toward a VDI model that kept workstations close to the data and accessible from anywhere. But according to the team, the legacy Citrix environment struggled to keep pace.

“The main issues with the Citrix VDI were overall stability and user experience,” says Spenser Brown, VDI administrator at Dunaway. “VMs were slow. Profiles would corrupt. We were troubleshooting constantly. The user experience was really poor.”

VM launches could stretch from nearly a minute to several minutes. Infrastructure fixes often required taking systems offline, causing disruptions across the firm. “Downtime would occur at least once a month,” Brown adds. “We’d end up working weekends to make sure deadlines were met.”

For a business built on billable hours, those disruptions had real consequences. “When the system went down, we lost billable hours” says Russel Moos, director of IT at Dunaway.

With instability persisting, and a Citrix licensing renewal deadline approaching, Moos saw an opportunity to rethink the company’s VDI strategy and move to a more stable, scalable solution.

Modernizing infrastructure with a 10-week migration

Working with vendor-agnostic IT services partner Virtualizen, Dunaway evaluated multiple options and redesigned its architecture from the ground up. Together, they aligned storage, compute, and GPU resources to match the demands of large engineering workloads. Dell and NVIDIA were closely involved to ensure the hardware configuration supported real-world production performance.

“We wanted to design the right system for our needs,” says Moos. “Virtualizen helped us evaluate our options and bring the right vendors to the table.”

With the new infrastructure in place, Dunaway launched a proof of concept (POC) using Omnissa Horizon®. Twenty carefully selected Dunaway engineers and designers from across disciplines ran live client projects in parallel environments, comparing Horizon directly against the legacy Citrix system under real working conditions.

During the POC, IT optimized RAM allocations, GPU profiles, and user configurations. The results showed that Horizon delivered a faster, more stable experience for production workloads.

As part of the evaluation, Dunaway also assessed a cloud-based Horizon deployment model. Given its GPU-intensive engineering workloads, large design files, and high-speed connectivity requirements, the team determined that an on-premises architecture provided better performance control and more predictable long-term economics for its environment.

Having validated Horizon on-premises, the team moved decisively. From POC launch to full migration, the transition took just 10 weeks.

Citrix and Horizon ran side by side during the transition, enabling a phased migration with minimal disruption. Once complete, Dunaway repurposed the former Citrix cluster into a second redundant Horizon pod, strengthening resilience while maximizing existing investment.

To shorten the learning curve and build in-house Horizon expertise, Dunaway engaged Omnissa Horizon® Accelerator, a service that provides expert guidance, migration planning, and knowledge transfer to streamline Horizon deployments from day one through ongoing operations. “The Accelerator engagement was really good,” says Moos. “It helped us ramp up quickly and take ownership of the environment. It got us where we needed to be.”

Faster performance, lower costs, and true scalability

The impact of moving to Horizon was immediate and measurable. “Today, our average VM launch time is about 12 seconds,” says Brown. “In the legacy Citrix environment, it was closer to 50 seconds—and sometimes even longer.”

Moos adds, “With the switch from Citrix to Horizon, we also saw about a 25% improvement in VM creation times, helping IT onboard users and deploy desktops faster.”

Together, these gains mean engineers don’t waste time waiting to access critical design files, while IT can provision desktops more quickly. For a firm working under tight project deadlines, faster and more predictable access translates directly into productive time and less friction across the business.

Stability has also become the norm. Regular production interruptions have disappeared, and IT can now patch hosts, perform firmware updates, and take servers offline without disrupting users. “With Horizon, we can take down a node, update it, and users don’t even notice,” says Moos. “That’s a huge change.”

With clearer visibility into logs and user sessions, the team can resolve issues quickly instead of reacting to widespread disruptions. That operational control is reinforced by a redundant architecture: Dunaway now operates two on-premises Horizon pods across separate Texas data centers, adding resilience the firm previously lacked.

Scalability is now predictable. When Dunaway needs additional capacity— whether for new hires, large contracts, or future acquisitions—the team can expand without redesign. “Horizon makes scaling straightforward. If leadership tells us we need 20 more VDI users, we already know how many nodes we need,” says Moos. “It’s painless. It’s quick.”

Financially, the move delivered clear ROI. Dunaway’s side-by-side comparison showed Horizon provided significant savings over the legacy Citrix environment while simplifying the licensing model. “When we compared Horizon to Citrix, Horizon came in about 40% lower. Bottom line, it’s cheaper,” says Moos.

For Virtualizen, the results reinforced the value of the architectural shift. “Dunaway moved into a far more stable environment with meaningful cost savings,” says Frank Risard, CEO of Virtualizen. “That kind of reliability protects project timelines, reduces risk, and gives the business confidence it can grow without the infrastructure holding it back.”

Advancing with the Horizon roadmap

With two on-premises Horizon pods in place, Dunaway is now working to further simplify the user experience across environments. The team is evaluating Cloud Pod Architecture capabilities that would provide a single access point, automatically routing users to the right pod based on membership and redirecting them if one becomes unavailable.

“We want to take advantage of Omnissa’s roadmap,” says Moos. “Automatic distribution and redirection through Cloud Pod Architecture is where we’re headed next.”