AZ-140 ep03 | Plan Azure Virtual Desktop Host Pool

this is a host pool i know it looks simple but there's a lot of things you need to think through and in this episode of the azure academy's az140 study guide we're going to talk about planning your windows virtual desktop post pools so buckle in i'm dean sefola and this is the azure academy pulse pools are a collection of one or more identical virtual machines within a windows virtual desktop environment and host pools are the heart of wvd session hosts are members of it app groups are connected to it and workspaces are associated with it each host pool can have one or more app groups associated with it which are collections of remote applications or desktop sessions that your users can access and another good thing to know is that once your first app group has been associated with the workspace every other app group in that host pool must also be associated with that workspace and there's many things to consider when planning all of this architecture out that's going to run your environment and some of the topics go deep so we'll have separate episodes for those so what do you need to think about when planning a host pool well first thing would be around your governance your naming convention what are you going to call this thing so that you have a consistent naming pattern across all of your host pools so that everyone knows when they see them what they are and what they should be doing also your tagging strategy in a previous episode we made a recommendation of several different kinds of tags that you should consider for your environment tags are not only metadata for your resources but a way to add automation on top of your wvd environment the next thing to think about is your location what azure region do you want your host pool in the reason why this is important is because of host pool metadata and as of today's date when i'm recording this the metadata is only stored in the us geography however it has been publicly announced on the roadmap that the european geography will be available soon now this is important because of data sovereignty so if you have a particular requirement that says you have to store your resources in this particular location or within this national geography say somewhere in europe then you need to be sure to select that as your host pool's location the next thing for you to think about is your validation settings think of it like a devtest qa kind of environment for your host pools so the workloads that are in there should match production identically and you should have users actively using it to make sure that everything's okay why because the validation pool is going to receive all of the wvd updates before the regular pools will this is so that you can monitor those service updates before any of them apply in your non-validation environments so without a validation pool you may miss simple errors that could have been easily avoided and now you have downtime or you may even have to implement a disaster recovery plan more on that in a second next decision you have to make is what kind of host pool do you want should this be a personal desktop environment a pooled desktop environment or a remote application environment now a pooled and remote app environment are the same kind of deployment but the app group configurations are different so we'll get into more of that a little bit later so personal or pooled what does your particular use case require and your workloads may also dictate that you need a personal and a pool that's okay so for example you could have a developer and they need to have a personal desktop and they're going to be doing a lot of coding they need to be local admins but then you could also have a whole lot of office workers who don't need all of those high level permissions and just need to do their job which for them could be running a web browser some office applications and that kind of thing and you could do that in a pooled environment but you're not limited to that your pooled environment could just as easily use high performance gpu enabled virtual machines it just depends on whatever your needs and requirements are but now let's assume for a second that you went with a pooled hose pool now you have a few other decisions to make one what is your maximum session limit how many people do you want to have on a single virtual machine at once what is it that dictates how many users you can stack onto a single vm no matter what the size of the vm is well it comes down to the work what is it that they're doing on that vm we're going to get more into this topic in vm configurations which is a future episode so be sure that you've hit the notification bell so that you know when that one comes out one last thought here on pooled host pools and that is the load balancing algorithm you have two choices breath first or depth first so what's the difference well let's assume that i have 10 virtual machines and i want to get 10 users on each virtual machine well there's two ways to manage that you can either let the system kind of manage itself that would be breadth first which means i'm going to put the first user here on vm1 the next one on vm2 the third one on vm3 etc or i could go depth burst which says i'm going to stack 10 users here on vm1 before anybody logs onto vm2 and of course there's differences in the management approach if breath will allow the system to manage itself more versus depth maybe in a more cost conscious kind of model where i want to maximize the use of that one virtual machine before i do anything with a second so let's now switch and look at our personal host pools we have a decision to make here as well the assignment type for our users will it be automatically determined or will i have a direct assignment now in the automatic assignment again the system will kind of manage itself but once the user gets assigned to a vm that one is theirs and no one else will log on in direct assignment i get to decide which vm you log on to this may be important depending on how you set up and manage your vms for example local admin permissions if i've pre-assigned the admin permissions when i built the machine then i want to be sure that the right person ends up on the right box now another thing to consider in your host pools are the rdp properties now we will have a separate video digging into this a little bit later but these are the customizations in your host pool environment what things do you allow and what do you block for example the clipboard or usb devices cameras even being able to control the particular screen resolution size all of that is customizable in your host pool but they are host pool specific i could have one pool configured to allow printer redirection but another pool to not allow it but you can't mix those settings in one pool so if you find that you need differences in that configuration you need more than one pool let's talk about virtual machines the question here is how many virtual machines do you need in your host pool now remember a host pool should be a collection of identical virtual machines so this is one particular kind of workload every one of them is going to have different needs capacity and application requirements which will determine your vm size number of vms and user density so you need to think through all of that before you build vms into your host pool now we will have a whole different section talking about monitoring and a bunch of episodes around that so i'll just mention here that you do need to consider monitoring when you're setting up your host pools and that's because we have diagnostic settings in wvd in all of our components and you need to know where that data is going to go are you going to use the native monitoring insights based on azure log analytics and the azure monitor or are you going to use a third-party integration and then where do you need to put that data so just know that before you go and build your host pools because monitoring is a key thing that a lot of people usually forget about and that brings us to the area of security there are two distinct role-based access control roles for wvd host pools desktop virtualization host pool contributor and reader so the reader obviously just has permission to view what's going on in the pool and the contributor can make any kind of technical change to the host pool but they cannot change permissions now there is another way to go and that is resource group based permissions for example if you give someone resource group contributor now they can do anything that a virtual desktop host pool contributor could do but they're not limited to just doing things on the host pool now they can do things on the virtual machine the network card the whatever else happens to be in that resource group so it depends on how granular you manage all of your permissions in the cloud final thing to talk about here is disaster recovery now there's many variations in how to do disaster recovery so i'll give you some things to think about first of all if you have a dr plan already you probably want to align wvd as close as possible to that strategy so that everything moves together with that said you've got a few different options for your host pools the first thing to think about is how big of a blast radius are you defending against do we have to defend against something going on with a particular service in a region or plan for the entire region to have an issue all of this is just a ratio of time effort and money and at some point there will be diminishing returns and that's up to you to decide and we will go far deeper on disaster recovery in upcoming episodes stay tuned for those so you've got a lot of things to go and think about in planning your host pool architecture and i hope i've been a help to you today if so click that like button subscribe and the notification bell because these videos will come out as fast as i can so it won't be on my normal sunday schedule and the next thing you should do is click over here on our study guide playlist so that you can go on to the next episode or you can check out the latest episode here at the azure academy thanks for joining us today and i'll see you in the next one happy learning

Channel: Azure Academy

Views: 7,529

Keywords: AZ-140 ep03, windows virtual desktop host pool, plan windows virtual desktop, Host Pool, WVD hostpool, wvd metadata, az-140 Windows Virtual Desktop Specialty, wvd App Group, az-140, plan wvd, wvd workspaces, Wvd certification, azure Virtual Desktop, az 140, Windows Virtual Desktop, rdp properties, az-140 WVD Specialty, Azure Academy, The Azure Academy, Windows Virtual Desktop Specialty, wvd load balancer, breadth first, Azure, Microsoft, Cloud PC, yt:cc=on, AVD

Id: FLbcayyodqk

Length: 9min 55sec (595 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 14 2021