Toride City drops VDI: pooled PCs, upgrade costs, operations

Toride, a city in Ibaraki Prefecture, has replaced the VDI behind its internal virtual desktops with pooled physical PCs, as the Japanese IT news site @IT reported in an October 16 article. When rising virtualization license prices inflate the cost of a renewal, what gets easier if you drop virtualization altogether, and what do you take on instead? I check this against the @IT article, the case study from Ascentech, the vendor that supplied the product, and the product documentation.

The renewal quote came in at more than 4 times the last one#

Following a model set by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, Japanese local governments split their internal networks into three: the My Number segment (for work involving My Number, Japan’s national ID number), the LGWAN segment (connected to the Local Government Wide Area Network), and the internet segment. This is known as three-tier separation. Toride used VDI-based virtual desktops so that a single device could reach more than one of these networks.

Ahead of renewing its whole information-system server environment, the city designed and costed a renewal that kept VDI, and found it would need a budget more than 4 times that of the previous renewal. In the case study, the deputy director of the city’s Information Management Division puts this down to general price inflation and soaring virtualization software license fees. Neither the article nor the case study names the virtualization product.

Virtualization license changes are hitting private companies too. According to another @IT article, Otsuka Corporation was told by the vendor of the virtualization product behind its IaaS that its service provider license would not be renewed. The company moved its platform to Nutanix.

Besides cost, there was the operational burden. The VDI needed scheduled maintenance several times a month, on Wednesdays after city hall closed, and this sometimes fell in busy periods when staff were already working overtime, such as the end of the month before a city council session. During maintenance, load concentrated on some of the physical servers, slowing the system or temporarily blocking logins. The deputy director also lists two other problems: you could not tell whether Windows would run smoothly without testing it on real hardware, and the servers were hard to design.

How the Remote PC Array works#

Toride chose Ascentech’s Remote PC Array 100. It holds 20 physical PC cartridges in a 1U chassis, and each user connects remotely from their own device to the one cartridge assigned to them. Because there is no hypervisor, no virtualization software license is needed.

Compared with VDI, these are the differences:

	VDI	Remote PC Array
What the desktop runs on	A virtual machine on a server	One physical PC cartridge per user
Virtualization software license	Required	Not required
Impact of other users’ load	Shared among users on the same server	None (each user has a dedicated cartridge)
How to scale	Add server resources and re-size	Add chassis one at a time
When something fails	The platform has to be diagnosed	Identify the affected cartridge and replace it

Management is done with a tool called Atrust Chassis Manager. With an agent installed in each cartridge’s OS, the tool can shut down and restart cartridges, change host names and join them to AD, and set IP addresses. The product page claims about 50% lower deployment cost per user and about 70% shorter design and build time than typical VDI, but both figures come from Ascentech’s own research.

How Toride ran the migration#

The city deployed 350 units on the LGWAN segment. 300 are used for daily work and groupware in departments that routinely handle residents’ information, such as citizen service counters, taxation and welfare, and 50 are for telework. My Number work was excluded from telework. A diagram in the case study document (PDF) shows the 300 in-office units with access to all three networks (My Number, LGWAN and internet), and the 50 telework units with access to the LGWAN and internet segments.

Toride spent a long time evaluating and a short time migrating. It visited a municipality in the prefecture that already used the product to confirm it ran reliably, and borrowed real units for testing starting two years before deployment. About a month before going live, the Information Management Division checked how everything worked, and 15 people ran a trial to surface problems. The case study says the 300 in-office units were switched over across 5 days, 50 per day (taken literally, that is 250 units, which does not match 300).

The part of the preparation that took effort was the “master PC,” which holds the common software and settings. According to the partner that handled the deployment, installing software on the master and testing it took about 1 to 2 months. Issues from the trial, such as printers and groupware integration, were fed back into the master in time for go-live. From the decision to adopt the product through building it and moving the whole city hall took about six months. Users got only a short manual, and there were no major problems, according to the case study.

What changed in cost and maintenance#

The renewal of the whole information-system server environment came in at about 1.7 times the cost of the previous renewal. Against an estimate of more than 4 times for staying on VDI, the gap looks large. Toride itself says, though, that price inflation makes a simple comparison difficult. The actual amounts have not been disclosed.

The deputy director names a bigger result than the numbers: scheduled maintenance has almost disappeared. After-hours work now rarely collides with overtime in busy periods. When a cartridge has a fault, staff only need to identify and replace that cartridge, which reduced both the impact on other users and the work of rebuilding the whole system.

Operations also became more flexible. Under VDI, the deputy director says, requests to install individual software had to be turned down because any change affected the whole master image. Now the city can make a change on specific cartridges only, so it can more easily meet needs like department-specific printer setups or introducing RPA. Because the setup is simple, the case study says, operations carried on after the staff member who knew it best at deployment was transferred to another post. The telework units let staff do LGWAN work not only from home but also at outlying facilities without a dedicated network, such as community centers.

What you take on by going back to physical#

The case study focuses on the results, but going back to physical PCs also means taking things on. The product documentation shows two.

First, performance is fixed by the cartridge specs. With a virtual machine you can change the CPU and memory allocated later; with a physical PC you cannot. According to the support period notice Ascentech issued on March 31, 2026, the Remote PC Array 100 Gen2 cartridge has a Core i3-1115G4, with 8GB or 16GB of memory. For heavy work such as engineering, there is a separate GPU-equipped model, the Remote PC Array 120.

Second, the hardware replacement cycle remains. The same notice lists an end-of-sale date and an end-of-support date for each cartridge model. The Remote PC Array 100 Gen2 ended sales on November 30, 2025, with support until December 31, 2030. The earlier 100, with a Core i5-7300U, ended sales on February 28, 2023, with support until March 31, 2028. Virtualization license renewals go away, but the time to replace cartridges and chassis still comes. The case study does not say which model Toride deployed.

Other municipalities, and the rethinking of three-tier separation#

Toride is not the only municipality to adopt the product. According to a BCN+R article, Okayama City had dedicated devices for its own network on top of the three networks of three-tier separation, so employees in the department concerned used 3 devices each. According to the case study, the city moved 40 of those dedicated terminals for the late-stage elderly medical care system onto the Remote PC Array, cutting the devices on each desk from 3 to 2. The product page also features a case in which Yonezawa City solved its “3 devices per person” problem.

Three-tier separation itself is also under review. The interim report of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications study group on revising its guidelines defined, as the “α’ model,” measures that let business devices use specific cloud services over the internet, for purposes such as web meetings. It also says the ministry will promote migration to the “β’ model” by widely sharing migration cases. Which model a municipality chooses will also change how much of its work needs a way to reach multiple networks from one device.

What is not known#

• The renewal amounts and their breakdown (Toride has published only the ratio of about 1.7 times)
• The name of the virtualization product whose license fees went up
• The cartridge model deployed, and the devices and connection software users have at their desks
• How the My Number and internet segments are connected (the diagram only shows which networks are reachable, not the path from the cartridges or users’ devices)

Many organizations have been reported moving to a different virtualization product in response to rising license prices. Toride instead accepted that per-user performance cannot be changed later, and chose a setup with no hypervisor at all.