Situation
A building design firm in Vilnius with 60 people designs residential and commercial buildings. About 35 employees, architects, structural engineers and building services designers, work with BIM models every day. The models grew every year: the model of an apartment complex with all its engineering systems reached several gigabytes, and opening it could take up to ten minutes.
The workstations had been bought five or six years earlier. Some designers worked on laptops because they often travel to sites and work from construction yards. This meant project files travelled on laptops, and the central version on the office file server was not always the latest. Twice a year the firm lost several days of work when a laptop failed or was left in a car.
The technical director calculated what it would cost to upgrade 35 workstations and laptops with suitable graphics cards. The sum was large, and in three years it would have to be repeated. He came to us with a question: is there another way?
What was needed
Together with the technical director and project managers we defined the requirements:
- Designers must work with BIM applications as smoothly as on a good local workstation, including 3D views and rendering.
- Work from the office, from home and from a construction site over an ordinary internet connection, without sending heavy files.
- All project files in one place, with versions and backups, and not a single project on a laptop.
- No new workstations; existing computers to be used as terminals for a few more years.
- Software licences must work in the cloud without breaching licence terms.
- A phased transition so that project deadlines do not suffer.
What we did
Week 1: pilot workstation
In our data centre in Lithuania we prepared a GPU cloud server with NVIDIA vGPU technology, which lets one physical graphics card be divided among several virtual workstations. We created three pilot workstations for different profiles: an architect, a structural engineer and a visualisation specialist, who needs the most graphics resources.
We sorted out the licensing of the BIM applications with the software vendors. Some licences were tied to specific hardware and had to be reissued. This took longer than planned and is the most important thing to start as early as possible.
Week 2: testing on real projects
Three designers worked only in the cloud for a week, on real projects. We measured opening time, smoothness of the 3D view, rendering time and, most importantly, the subjective impression. The largest model opened in just under two minutes instead of ten, because the files and the workstation were in the same data centre instead of travelling over a network.
The hardest was the visualisation specialist’s workstation: the initial vGPU profile was too small for rendering, and we had to allocate a larger share of graphics memory. In the end we defined three such profiles, by role.
Week 3: files and access
We moved all project files from the office file server and laptops to file storage in the same data centre. We introduced a clear project folder structure and permissions by project team. We enabled server backup with Veeam: daily backups in Lithuania and a second copy in an Amazon data centre in Germany, with 60 days of history.
We set up access to the workstations through a VPN with two-factor authentication. From a construction site a designer connects with any laptop or tablet and sees the same workstation as in the office. Not much bandwidth is needed; a mobile connection is enough.
Week 4: phased migration
We moved the remaining workstations in groups of ten per week, each time starting with the team that had no approaching deadline. The old workstations stayed on as terminals, and now they only need a screen and a connection. No project files remain on laptops, and local drives are encrypted.
Result
The firm did not buy a single new workstation. The existing computers, which would no longer have been enough for BIM work, will serve as terminals for a few more years. Instead of a large one-time investment, there is a monthly fee for 35 graphics workstations in the cloud, which can be increased or decreased according to the volume of projects: in summer, when there are more interns, a few workstations are added, and in autumn they are switched off.
All project files are 100% in the data centre, with daily backups in two countries. Since the migration there has not been a single case of a project being lost together with a computer. Designers work the same way from sites, home and the office; project managers say that coordinating models with subcontractors has become faster, because files no longer need to be sent, it is enough to grant access.
We measure it simply: the number of workstations and their utilisation are visible in the management dashboard, and opening times and recovery tests are checked every quarter.
I expected designers to complain that the cloud was slower. The ones complaining are the ones we have not migrated yet.
What we would advise in a similar situation
- Start with licences. BIM and CAD vendors have different rules for working in a virtual environment, and this takes the longest.
- Run the pilot workstations with real projects and real people, not demo models. A visualisation specialist will need a different profile than a structural engineer.
- Move the files together with the workstations. If the workstation is in the cloud and the files are in the office, you gain little.
- No project files should remain on laptops. It is not only a security matter but also one of intellectual property, when the project is the company’s main product.
