Azure Virtual Desktop: 7 Pricing Considerations

at the moment a lot of my time is spent with helping customers with wvd projects so that's customers who are looking to use the great capabilities of virtual desktops within it within Azure the first step on that process is always really trying to work out what it's going to cost because with wvd you've got two different kinds of costs you've got static costs or things like the authentication network in firewalling and then the best bit about wvd is the consumption the fact that if the users not using your desktop you want to turn it off and only get charged for that period and it's difficult to balance both costs and really try and get an accurate view on what we think it's going to look like now typically we do start with a POC to really kind of get an accurate reflection but before we do that we need to get the board to sign off on some level of investment the first place to start is looking at the users and trying to group users together not necessarily by department but by the way they use their desktop the applications and the type of use the first place to start is looking whether they need admin rights and we can start thinking about using Windows 10 multi-session multi-session means we can have multiple people using a VM at the same point which is really where you get their cost efficiencies so what's gonna knock man out is really admin access so if you've got a user that needs admin access to change you know the way that their applications are then they're probably gonna need a private deployment or Windows 10 if the users are happy with a gold image so all the applications are there and standardized but just some personal personalization around settings then we can start to use Windows multi-tenant ethics logic then think about the applications if they've just got web applications and what we're trying to do is work out a ratio of how many users Purvi CPU so web apps a light user probably get away with 6 users per V CPU standard office applications a medium user maybe four users per V CPU and heavier users maybe the you know where we're doing a bit more kind of so maybe a few legacy applications in there maybe free users per V PC you we've got groups then of people between the way that they use their applications and how many V CPU we're going to need to power that then for each group let's think about their working day maybe if that team is online eight to eight five days a week then we can add that for Group one those light users maybe and then think about the concurrency of that team so maybe we've got a core of 90% or 100% of that team working on their virtual desktops between nine and five but maybe outside of kind of 5:00 and 8:00 p.m. we've got dropping down to five percent ten percent so find those ratios and the actual pricing to of in Azure allows you to model that information in and therefore you start getting an understanding of what that wvd past service is gonna gonna need so put them in the pricing calculator with those ratios on times and user groups then we need to think about licensing a lot of customers using wvd are probably got office 365 on our Microsoft 365 in play now you're looking for wvd rights with Windows 10 and I would also recommend multi-factor authentication which typically comes with p1 so that's when someone's logging into the desktop then they get challenged for two-factor authentication as it's a web service I'd definitely recommend that so if you're a current 365 user check your rights typically business premium III in five is included if you're not an office 365 or Microsoft 365 user the new f3 is probably the minimum entry point I think you can get away with at 7 pound 50 year user so have a look at the licensing so it's Windows 10 rice and multi-factor authentication then we've got another consumption area which is storage now within the calculator some things are added and some things are left off so first thing within the server build we need to make sure that the host pools and the service that get provisioned have got their own storage to them the OS so that the calculator will allow you to add that in use premium SSD because you want a really fast experience then we've got profile storage that FX logic users Microsoft recommend s app files now be mindful that that starts at a four terabyte minimum entry point so if you've got a smaller user number you're not going to need that amount of space so maybe default - as your files then the other storage requirement tends to be users file share storage which you can use either as your files or net out file so model all that in the pricing calculator so you've got a user profile we know what kind of storage and we've kind of got a good feel of the desktop experience and licensing then we're looking at some of the static and also consumption elements and networking is a good place to start so typically we have a hub network and the spoke network within a zoo or four wvd the Hope network really is there to support site to site and VPN connectivity so we could use an Express route or a site-to-site VPN to price that we need to think about what's going to be traversing from as you're into the egg into your on-prem environment that it could be for application usage and that's quite a hard thing to size so you need to work out what that traffic's gonna be and size that in the POC but start with a VPN gateway that is app that is availability zone aware so this is a specific SKU not the free one it's the kind of a next one up which gives you availability zone awareness because if you've got a service that goes across multiple data centers within Azure you want to make sure that the actual VPN connection can also work across availability zones then you've got the actual outbound bandwidth of the user I normally start with about 200 KB per user per month to about a Meg so this is when they're on my desktop and they're obviously going out to web apps or or surfing the web etc so you need to add that bandwidth element in and something that people also can miss off the pricing character as well is intravenous charges so if you've got a VPN gateway in a home network that then jumps into a spoke network anything crossing v net peering will incur costs as well so add those costs in the next cost you need apart on the calculator is think about authentication the way that wvd worked or typically you need to make sure that your active directory which I guess might be on premise is synchronized into a zoo or ad now as your ad isn't like a full ad server so you get that as a free service and obviously you'll have you probably your office 365 subscription you then need to think about is your environment because you are putting a load of the m's into a data center so you need domain level authentication microsoft i've got a past service called Active Directory domain services that's quite hard to find in the pricing calculator it's under a zoo or ad and then there's a next level down or a lot of customers for an actual physical VM with Active Directory enduring it to their domain make sure you deploy to a these servers and put them in separate availability zones so make sure you build that into the pricing then you've got security to think about so with AD you've got all the oil back controls we know we've got P 1 for multi-factor authentication you're gonna need a firewall in there I would recommend as your firewall port those network costs because you get charged from what's translating the firewall as well so take your network calculations and build that into the firewall cost and something else if the desktop that people don't think about straight from the off is web filtering and antivirus now you've probably got a corporate web filtering solution it might be an external solution that you can proxy through or you might have a desktop client for web filtering there's nothing great out the box for Azure but you know there are a few different elements within some of the services you can configure with Azure firewall you can do a level of filtering but it gets quite onerous because there's no URL categories there and then antivirus there are some tools within em 365 or people take the normal core corporate ad and the last pricing to think about is operations so make sure you factor in the day-to-day monitoring log in network what you know what your tools so I normally look at the number of VMs we're gonna have make sure we've got as your monitor pricing built in there for the dashboards in in there we're thinking about logging and Security Center and network watcher so that is a lot of cost but think about all most different elements when pricing up your wvd solution if you need a bit of help more than happy to you know give you some advice pull some designs and you know prices together to give you that benchmark importantly you really have to see how a user is going to use this in real life so this pricing will get you to a proof of concept and then you can really validate your assumptions and make the tweaks you need to get the right pricing model to take back to the board to move ahead with the project [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Node4 Limited

Views: 1,018

Keywords: Microsoft, Azure, Windows, Virtual, Desktop, WVD, Public Cloud, Digital, Transformation, Technology, MSP, AWS, Virtualisation

Id: MA9MiMVgsgE

Length: 9min 55sec (595 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 15 2020