The  award winning Corona-Norco Unified School District serves more than 54,000 K-12 students from the California cities of Corona, Norco and Eastvale, as well as unincorporated parts of Riverside County.

One of the 10 largest districts in the state, it employs approximately 5,000 people. Like many public school districts, Corona-Norco has a goal to reduce capital expenses and technology costs overall for its schools to ensure equal access to technology. With costs rising and a small IT team challenged to drive all over a large, traffic-choked area to deliver services, the district faced a big choice when they decided to upgrade in-school computing: buy more sophisticated and expensive hardware for each school, or take a different approach.

They chose a suite of digital workspace solutions that make it simple and cost-effective to manage mobile devices, upgrade to Windows 10 and distribute and maintain apps using virtual desktops. In 2012, the district started to roll out virtual desktops on zero clients at schools. Corona-Norco now supports 8,000 zero clients and around 5,000 VDI concurrent desktops – with a full-time staff of two. “We don’t see the support number changing dramatically as we significantly ramp up the number of devices,” said Brian Troudy, the district’s director of networking and infrastructure. Adding to the device count is the district’s embrace of the BYOD model for maximum flexibility and choice.

VMware AirWatch and VMware Workspace ONE extend the district’s digital workspaces beyond classroom computers to tablets and laptops, allowing faculty, students and staff to access any app on any device at any time.