Live: Azure Virtual Desktop | What is it, how does it work and why should you care?

and welcome to another live stream this time our topic is azure virtual desktop and the the format will be basically the same as for our last live stream that will be me talking going through a presentation and then we'll do some demos a q a all that fun Jazz so um yeah leave your questions down in the comments and I will get to them in the Q a part I would really like it if you actually had some questions so feel free um but yeah let's get to it I guess so the topic is azure virtual desktop as described and our short little agenda is then what how why doing some demos talk about how much as in you know costs and then the Q a in the end of the live stream so um let's get cracking I guess let's get to what what is azure let's stop well it's virtual apps and desktops so yeah you can publish apps you can publish desktops and then your users can consume those I guess and um these apps are then installed on session hosts or regular VMS they are called sessions but we'll get to that in a minute and these can be based on Windows 10 or 11 or they can be based on a Windows Server operating system uh 2012 R2 and later is the requirements there keynote service might notice there is no Linux option here um you can kind of make it happen but but it won't be a as good experience as with the windows based operating systems um you can of course always consume from any operating system that you want but yeah you are limited to the Windows 10 11 and Windows Server operating system and the fact that you can use a client based operating system here like Windows 10 or 11 is really neat because that does give a better user experience for your users because you know a lot of stuff doesn't really work that well with a server-based operating system and attribute to desktop is uh as far as I know the only place where you can have a client operating system multi-session so you can have Windows 10 or Windows 11 multi-session um you could could have you have been you've had the option to do multi-session on server-based operating system for years and years but with Azure virtual desktop that was the first time we could do it with a client based operating system so that is one of the key benefits of azure virtual desktop but you can of course also do single session if that is what you want um it it is as a service so you pay for the Azure virtual Desktop Service then and everything is managed within there but you need to bring your own session hosts so we'll get to kind of the segregation of roles here but but for the most part you pay for a service and then you just bring your own session host and uh yeah for those familiar with the old RDS setups within windows then you probably recognize the session house role but basically every other infrastructural you get as a service Handle by Microsoft so yeah and that ties kind of into how the how the Azure virtual Desktop Service works and uh you have all these roles or responsibilities that you need to you know take care of when doing a RDS environment for yourself so you need to have a Gateway you need to have the web access you need to have storage licensing management tools images use profiles and so on but since most of the Azure virtual Desktop Service is provided to you as a service then you don't really have to worry too much about all of these because you have a separation some of things are hand value a small amount of other things and most of it is handled by Microsoft now some of these you know Puffs cross uh here and there like the compute part because yes you will have to provide your own session host but they will be running in an Azure data center so well uh so some of them cross but this is the basic idea of how the responsibility is split it up in the the Azure virtual Desktop Service so the infrastructure parts that's handled by Microsoft Gateway role the web access role connection broker the license broker the load balancing and the management tools are all handled by Microsoft and you don't really have to worry about them they will be there and working and scale to your needs what you do need to handle is the session hosts and the identity those things are something you need to handle and provide and the session host is basically the the Workhorse in this kind of setup this is where the published apps are are running so this would be if you for example use a published app and run word as a published app on your end user device then that application isn't running online it's running on the session host so that's what the session host is well he's um but there are also different kinds of ways of handling identity up in all this um you do need Azure ID so you need to have user accounts in Azure ID but you can also opt to bring your active directory identities within this so if you have a working active directory you can bring those identities and use them in Azure that's about as well of course if you have this them synced to Azure ID now um you can also make use of the Ash ready domain Services role if you want the active directory benefits in this kind of a setup but you already are you know all Azure ID so you can use actually the identities you can use active director rather than today's sync to Azure ID and you can use Azure ad domain services in order to you know provide the identity to this service and regarding identities there's a bit complicated authentication flow which can be you know confusing at first because you or your rather your user sign in to the Azure virtual Desktop Service with their Azure ID accounts but when they fire up a published app or a published desktop then they well at least with the default settings sign into that session host so for the example with the active directory you would then sign in with your active directory account on the session host but um that that works well and all but if you are using Azure ID join session hosts then you can get some issues around things like MFA for example if for example you have Legacy MFA enabled or you have conditional access but you haven't excluded the VM user signing app then the user will log into the actual Azure virtual Desktop Service all fine they will be prompted for MFA and all that but once they log into the session host or rather try to log in then MFA isn't supported and the authentication will fail there unless you you know not use the default settings so it's good to have a grasp of how the authentication flow Works within Azure ID within Azure desktop sorry because you know that could cause some confusion and Azure desktop can be set up in really simple scenarios like this one uh here you have just a couple of session hosts in Avnet these are then Azure ID joined so they will be communicating with the Azure virtual desktop control plane which contains all of the magic bits and pieces of azure virtual desktop here I've written down the the web access the Gateway the broker Diagnostics and rest API but really all the magic around Azure desktop all the infrastructure parts that I mentioned earlier is running within the Azure virtual desktop control plane so the sessions will be communicating with the control plane but when you as an ND user on the right side on this drawing um connect to the Azure virtual Desktop Service you are using your Azure ID account and signing in with that so the authentication is based on Azure ID so that means that any identity protection measures that you have in place like MFA like conditional access like identity product detection and so on will be in play and you know protecting the identities and then the Azure virtual desktop control plane will then communicate back with the session hosts so your sesh notes are never really exposed to public internet which which is also a huge benefit in this kind of setup so this is a simple scenario a bit a bit more complex scenario is this one where you have session hosts and you have some profile storage we have Azure ID domain services and so on so they've been quickly just go run through this setup here you have these session hosts that are are also making use of a storage account for profile storage which is important because when you have multiple session hosts you are not guaranteed that your user will be signed into the same session host each and every time so if they sign in and customize their setup and add some files locally or something like that and then the next time they log in they get signed into a different session notes then you know all those changes will be gone but using a profile storage like a storage account with Azure files FS Logics and all that fun Jazz then they will have one Central user profile that will then be connected to the session host they are logging on to so in this kind of scenario we are using fslogix to store our users profiles these session hosts are not jumped at ready they are joined to the Azure ID domain Services active directory domain and furthermore you can see that we have like a virtual Network Gateway in the Hub Network here this virtual Network Gateway can then be connected to to an express route for example so connecting back to your on-prem environment and by that you can use these sessions to access resources on your on-prem environment but other than that from the control plane out everything is still the same as it were in the last scenario so this kind of just exemplifies how Azure virtual this can be in a simple scenario and a bit more complex so now this is by no means the most complex signal but it is a decent example so moving on to the Y section you know why should we care about the Azure virtual desktop well apart from the Cool Tech of course um you have a huge amount of flexibility the um the Azure virtual desktop is highly customizable in how you want to set it up and how you want to use it meaning that it can cover a bunch of different use cases so it is really really flexible but it is also really really scalable so this is both in terms of scaling scaling up and down and outs and back in but keep in mind that the the control plane that we discussed is handled by Microsoft and the scaling there is done by them so the control plane where you had like the connection broker the load balance and then all that that is always going to be scaled to your needs always going to be ready for you but the session hosts part for example is something you need to worry about the scaling but you can do it any way you want if you want to scale up and down meaning changing sizes of your session hosts to a beefy one when you have a high amount of usage then back down to something smaller when there's not a lot of usage then you can do that but you can also scale out and have multiple session hosts and then scale back in once you don't have that same kind of need and the neat thing is that this can all be done automatically for you so say for example well at least the scaling out and back in part so say for example you want to scale out when the work hours start so 7am that's when people start to connect and need sessions to be available well then you can scale out and then once the workday is done you can scale back in in order to you know for example save on cost so scalability of azure desktop is really really huge not to mention the fact that you can also stack multiple users on a single session host which is a neat feature it allows also for um offloading of heavy tasks so say for example um you need to run regularly a heavy task on your local device which Hogs up all the resources making you unable to work at the same time as that task is running then you can offload that task and run it as a published app or in a published desktop or what have you and tasks can be completed there while you continue to work on your local and local device so say for example you are editing video or doing 3D renderings then you can do all the work but when the time comes to do the final render you can do that in the session host or the published app the published desktop meaning you can continue to work instead of you know just sitting around with linear thumbs so that's one really cool use case for Azure versus desktop but it also allows for you know running Windows based apps on Mac OS for example so if you need Vizio but you're using a Mac well then you can use Azure virtual desktop to publish that app to your Mac so yeah that's also something that ties within the boy bring your own device and since all all the things are happening within the session host that's the only devices that you as an organization need to worry about so you can make sure that your session hosts are secure and managed and patched and all that but it takes the pain away of having to worry about the end users devices and furthermore they can use whatever they want so if you have someone who really has a need to use Linux for example then they can continue to use Linux because every core everything corporate wise is within that session host and they connect you to it through the Azure virtual desktop so you know using a service like this then the end users devices doesn't really matter anymore and the costs is also a part of what is flexible with Azure desktop and because like I said you can scale out and in and up and down thus managing your costs quite a lot but meaning that it but since the sessionals are basically Azure VMS you can also make use of other costs cost lowering features like result instance so you can managed to have cut down costs quite a lot by taking some you know cost effective measures so yeah it's flexible also in terms of cost this kind of topic also kind of ties in with the be bringing your own device but seeing if you have a Azure virtual desktop environment ready to go and you do a new high for example all they really need is their identity because you've already provided everything else so as soon as they have the user account they can log into the Azure virtual Desktop Service and begin working without the the hassle of waiting for a laptop to be installed and configured and you know maintained by the IIT department they will simply log into a browser for example on some random computer and access Azure virtual desktop and they can begin to start working would start a given that they actually will but at least they have the options to do so and you know this um also works in where you'd hire consultants for example they don't have to have their own laptop they they don't need to configure their laptop tops they can just log into azurebox desktop and start working and these are some of my reasons as to why you should consider Azure virtual desktops it won't be the perfect fit in each and every scenario but I feel like you should at least have um have this have Azure versus desktop in the back of your head when you're considering different scenarios and different setups there are also more and reasons and use cases than these for example you can use Azure virtual desktop as a as a starting point for your movement from on-prem to to Azure for example because say you move the the workspace for your users to Azure virtual desktop first meaning instead of using local apps and local infrastructure to work they will use the Azure desktop to connect to your on-prem service then you can you know move one server at a time one system at a time at your own pace without the users actually noticing anything different because they are already using Azure virtual desktop as their you know way in to your setup but yeah um enough talk for now let us do some demos so um this is not going to be like a complete overview a complete breakdown of every bit and piece of azure desktop but it's going to be a you know brief overview of how Azure virtual desktop works and what you can do with it so this is in the the Azure virtual desktop parts of the Azure portal and the first thing you see here is you know better create a host pool and that's important because you know that's the basics of the Azure virtual Desktop Service you need a host pool to have your session hosts in which you then can use to you know provide apps and desktops from so um considering that let's start by checking out the host pools so I I have provided two different hospitals here I have one containing session hosts that are Azure ID joint and I have one containing session hosts that are a d join so I have the HP aad01 here which is the the Azure ID joined one and I have the HP ad01 which are the azure sorry not Azure the active directory joined once so if we take a look at the Azure ad01 here and you know the overview gives you a decent look of how the host pool is performing and how it's set up you see that I have two machines of which one is available machines in this case is the session hosts you can see how many sessions there are how many application groups which we'll get to in a bit applications and so on and since scaling was a lot thing I talked a whole lot about let's check out these scaling plans in my case here I have set up a scaling plan for the weekdays and enable this on the host pool meaning that this scaling plan here will apply to the host pool and the sessions with it so if I click on this and check out the settings on it if you go to the schedules we can see that I have a weekdays schedule that runs Monday through Friday and if we click that as well you can see this is actually the same wizard that you go through when creating a new scaling plan so it's kind of a neat example you see the the time zone which this is uh for uh or using because we will get to some some times in terms of when it's scaling up and down and so on so time zone is important because otherwise you know you could be end up in a case where you're scaling up in the middle of the night and it's getting down in the middle of the workday which would be a bad situation so you have the name and you have which days to repeat the schedule on so in my case I have done nothing on the Saturday and Sunday so this this scaling time will only apply Monday through Friday hitting next is the ramp up section of this schedule this is where the scaling time will begin to power on more session hosts and in my case the start time is 7am meaning that on7 at as the clock reaches 7 am I will switch the load balancing algorithm of depth first this means that it the Azure version Desktop Service will try to fill up each session host before assigning users to a new one as opposed to the breath first which will try to spread out your users as thinly as possible across across the highest amount of sessions it can do so in my case here I I'm the first I have a minimum percentage of hosts at 20 meaning that at 7 am at least 20 percent of the session hosts in the host pool this is assigned to should be running and available so say for example you have 10 session hosts in a host pool this would then mean that at least two of them should be online at 7am and the capacity threshold here is at which point should new session hosts be powered on and powered on is actually a keyword here because you need to have your session host provisioned and you know working because the scaling plan doesn't create new sessions for you it will only power on or off any existing session host so keep that in mind the capacity of threshold is if you have a user limit of say 10 users per session hosts if that sixth user then logs in then it will fire up a new session host because that sessions is then considered full so back to the example of 10 session hosts in a host pool they should be at least two of them running at 7am and they should not be Fuller than 60 percent and furthermore we have the peak hours which is you know the it kind of like the name implies it's the peak hours where you have the most amount of usage of your system in my case it starts at 9 00 am and still we will use the depth first now in this scenario it would be a actually a good thing to use the breath first because you know this is where you have the most amount of users and if you want to problem with the best possible experience then you should have a as few users and sessions active at the same time as possible so in my case I have the depth first but do consider to have the breath first during your peak hours then we have the the ramp down this is when the scaling plan should start to you know power off session host in order to cut down on your costs so at 4 pm I will be in this case still using it at first but this would be when you switch from breath first to that first for example and at this point I only need 10 of my session hosts running as a minimum so you know back to the example of 10 session notes in the host pool that would be that would mean that one should be running at all times and now the capacitor threshold is also set to 90 percent so in this case the the sessions should be rather full before it fires up a new session host you can also have the the option to force log of your users and um this is kind of important because if you have breath first for example and spread your users thinly across all of your session hosts then if you don't force them to log off then they will be still signed into the session host and the sessions will not be powered off meaning that you will still have as many session hosts running as you had during your peak hours for example so do select yes on the force log of users but then again also set up a decent delay time before it actually logging them off the delaying time here in my case 30 minutes is the time between they send the notification message that we have down here and they are forced to log off so at 4 pm in my case I will begin to scale down my environments and the users will get a notification staying that scaling down due to end of work hours you will be logged off in 30 minutes make sure to save your work and then 30 minutes after that they the system will start to force log of your users or my users rather so this is the rundown and then you have the off peak hours in my case this starts at 6 pm and that switches the load balancing algorithm to depth first if it at any point was breath first so so this is when the I expect there to be low load on my Azure virtual assistant environment and also notice that this is a start time and not an end time so in my case where I have this schedule running Monday through Friday this will be done at 6 pm on Friday the off-peak hours begins and they will then last up until the ramp up start time on Monday so meaning that off-peak hours will be from Friday at 6 PM until Monday at 7 00 am in my case and of course then every night in between the weekdays as well so that's the the scaling plan it works really nice and is a also the the reason why you can see in my host tool that I have one unavailable session notes because the scaling plan has turned that one off and then we have the RDP properties and if you've ever tried to edit an RDP file within notepad for example and you will notice a few similarities here at least when we come to the advanced part but this has a couple of different tabs I will not be going into detail of each and every one of them but I want to highlight a couple like the Azure ready Authentication this is not the default setting the default setting I believe is not configured but um I mentioned previously that there if you have Azure ID join session hosts and don't enable Ash ready authentication then you can run into issues if you are for example using conditional access and not have excluded the Azure VM sign-in application because if the Azure ID authentication is not enabled then when your users are signing into the session host meaning firing up a published app or a published desktop the authentication will go to that local session host which then in turn will try to authenticate with Azure ID and in doing so the MFA part is not supported so so if you have done a conditional access policy requiring MFA then the authentication will break and your results will be unable to sign in with a pretty generic uh wrong username and password error message so that can be really tough to troubleshoot make sure that you have Azure ID authentication enabled and set it to the RDP will attempt to use actually the authentication to sign in and we also have session Behavior do you want to enable or disable reconnects for example and bandwidth how to detect places where you configure that device redirection is important for one of the user cases for Azure so that sorry device reduction is important for one of the use cases for Azure desktop which I didn't mention earlier and that is if we want to use Azure virtual desktop as a Gateway into a locked down environment because if you have like a lockdown environment you can set up Azure versus desktop within that environment and it's going to be a rather safe jump post because the connection from the session host goes out to the control plane and the sessionals themselves are not directly exposed so using azure's desktop as a locked down jump post system is really good but then you should also consider all the device redirection here like turning off audio output on the local device local in this case meaning your end user's device for example disable redirection of drives the clipboard and so on if you use Azure desktop for a locked environment this is where you should configure a lot of stuff but also keep in mind that you have features like the screen capture protection and the watermarking feature of azure virtual desktop will also help if you are using Azure virtual desktop in a lockdown environment screen capture protection will block the ability to do screen captures from the local device and the watermarking feature will add watermarks to the session so if there's a screen grab or leak or some kind you can trace it back to where the session that it originates from um I do have a video on it if you want to check it out later on and of course the display settings here is where you enable multiple displays or you can also set a specific size if you want I would recommend you leave these at default because the user can themselves in the clients yeah override these default settings and do what they want um enable multiple multiple display supports what that does is once a user fires up a desktop that desktop will cover all of their monitors not everyone wants that some people want that but train your users so that they know they can change this setting in their local client as well so you know they have at least have a choice um the last here is the advanced and basically this this text box here is a summary of all the other settings that were done on the other tabs but you have some more options as well a good example is for example the enable RDS Aid off is one meaning it's enabled and this Advanced tab is often used when Microsoft releases new features for Azure virtual desktop they are often available for you to specify here before they are available as a selection in the other tabs here so that's a likely scenario where you will be using the advanced tab other than that basically just use the tabs and do your selections there and moving on to the properties over our host pool there's this one thing to keep in mind here and that is the start vml connect because like I said you have the option to scale automatically up and down but in smaller setups where you perhaps you only have one session host then you can actually turn that one off and then have no session hosts running and then enable the start VM on connect meaning that if Azure virtual desktops detects a user trying to log on and that there is no session host available it will power on that VM so that's a really neat feature for smaller environments just keep in mind that it also requires you to give the Azure virtual Desktop Service or app registration the permissions to power on VMS the validation environment setting here is um well basically if you want to be a beta user or not so the the session host will have for example a an agent installing them then they will have that that's that's a that's a fact but the update updates to those agents will be you know production ready but if you want or you rather if you enable the validation environment then any near production versions of those agents will be pushed out to your session host and you also get the option to use some newer features or public preview features for example so validation environments is not something you enable on your host pool in a production environment unless you really need a specific feature that is only available for validation environments but then do also keep in mind that you are like a beta taste tester for Microsoft in that case the properties is also where you select the the default load balancing algorithm for your host pool in my case it's depth first this is where you could select the breath first but then again the scaling plan can adjust this according to your schedule and also you have the max session limit which is how many sessions are there room for before a session host is considered full right so quickly imagining The Nest breaking here this is where private link will be living once it's out of public preview so if you want private endpoints with your Azure desktop setup this is where you would configure that you can also join the public preview but if I remember correctly this requires you to re-register the attributes as the provider so it will potentially break any Azure list of environments you have running as of now so if you have any production afterwards desktops then wait for the ga of private endpoints I mentioned the agents on your session hosts they will have updates at given intervals uh when Microsoft C fits but you can also schedule them if you so want so if you enable the schedule agent updates you can select a maintenance window for your session host and within that time slots the updates to the engines will be installed as opposed to you know when Microsoft see if it's and then we have the session hosts I have mentioned them so many times but this is the overview of the session has been my Azure ID joints host pool as you can see I have one that is available and one that is unavailable I have one that has two sessions on it and the other one has nonsense since it is unavailable if I for example click on this session host then you can see some basic information and some checks you can enable drain modes and what this is is that it's doesn't throw users out or force them to log off but it will not enable any new users to log in to that session hosts which is a more pleasant way I guess of draining your session hosts and making them available for you know maintenance and stuff like that you also have the users tab here which will show you all the users that are currently signed in or at least have a session on your session host and selecting one of them you can then notify them log off or Force log of them as well and if you want you can click the name here and then you will be brought to the standard VM management of you know a regular old Azure VM because this sessionals is a regular old Azure VM and you get all the other kinds of management as you do with a regular VM from here so um going back to the main page of azure virtual desktop you also have application groups here and in my case you see that I have four I have two of uh I have two desktop application grips that's one for each of my host pools and I have two remote app application groups also one for each of my uh host pools in this case you can have multiple Remote App application groups but you can only have one desktop application group per host pool and the application groups is well as the name implies they contain applications or desktops in the matter of the desktop application group so if I go into the Azure ID app Group here you see that I have two applications and I have one assignments and if I go to Applications here you can see the applications that this application group is you know supplying to any users assigned to this application group and one way to add applications here which is really really nice is if I click add I can select application Source start menu this actually brings in the start menu of my session host and I can select an application from that start menu so if I for example oh pretty want to publish the oh what what should we do excel let's do Excel and then I'll hit save then any users assigned to this application group will have access to that Excel application and the assignments I can check here in my case it's only a better hybrid that has been assigned to this application group but that also means that he has now access to these three applications I would recommend using grips instead of specific users but your mileage may vary and the final thing I wanted to show here for now is the the workspaces and this is how should I put it it will probably make more sense once I jump to the client a bit later on but if we go into this you can see that um you have some applications group contained within this workspace and the workspace is basically what's presented to your users I said that the application grips is where you assign access but then the workspace is how it's presented to your users so so that's shortly what the workspace is I'll go into a bit more detail on it later on um do you want to mention the properties and the friendly name here if we want to give it a better name for your users other than WS avd Live 01 um and before we jump to the client side of things let's also take a look at monitoring and you know insights so if I click on the insights here you you have a huge amount of data available for you to you know either troubleshoots or get a view of how your environment is is performing this is based on log analytics so you would need to configure your host pools and your session host and all that to send data to that log analytics workspace I'll show you how in a minute but that also means that in terms of costs this is another one that you have to keep in mind because you know the data that the sessions and the whole spools and so on put into that log analytics do have a cost associated with them So within this insights here you select the research group and the host pool and so on and you get some basic information here connection Diagnostics and so on which is also all pretty neat one thing that is cool is the connection Diagnostics which does add the default setting give you a good sign good feeling of the how connections are well performing do they succeed do they fail and so on but this button here with the focus on failures is really neat in a troubleshooting scenario because you know it focuses on failures so with with this set to yes then all of these boxes are focusing on all failed attempts failed connection attempts and so on meaning that it's a bit easier to actually drill down and find out why was a connection failed so if we go to a user for example this one here you see that it did fail on the logon scrolling down you can see that is an authentication log on failure in this case I know for a fact that it was due to the fact that Legacy MFA was enabled meaning you know as I discussed earlier that authentication to that Azure ID joint sessionals then to Azure ID failed because of the MFA not being supported so this is the kind of error message you would see in your logs if that were the case and furthermore here you have connection performance uh to you know view realm shift time and stuff like that you have host performance utilization is a really good thing to to you know see are my session hosts over powered are they underpowered do I have enough sessions for my amount of users and so on and of course also you have stuff like alerts if you have any alerts triggered in your Azure virtual desktop so the insights here is really really powerful given that you make use of it so you configure this by using the workbooks here and then you have the check configuration and then let's scroll down to the top um you select a resource Group and a host pool and optionally also the log analytics workspace now in my case all of my host pools are already sending their Diagnostics data to log analytics but if that wasn't the case I would have a button here simply stating you know enable the kind of configure this house pool to send diagrams of data I can't remember the exact phrasing on the button but it's basically one button and then deploy and it's done it's really really simple to onboard your um your host pools and your session hosts and all that to log analytics and start using this insights feature and another neat thing about this one is the data generated where you can see the data that is being sent into your log analytics because as I said that does have a cost associated with it so that's also a good thing to have um have a good view on this gives you just how much data has been consumed by your log Analytics yeah shouldn't we jump actually over to our client so let us see here if we go like that I have a client here see if I can log in oh come on there we are I have installed the remote desktop client here and you can see that I have the Ws avd level one that is the the workspace that I mentioned so this is these are all from different application groups but they are presented as a whole from that workspace so that is why you should you know set up a good friendly name for example to your workspaces so that's what I meant about it making more sense once I got to the client side of things now in my case you see that I have published three different apps and I have a couple of desktops but we don't see Excel yet which we did you know assigned to me so if I click the Ellipsis here and then do refresh then it should pop up in a minute or two there we are there we can also see the Excel application as a published app and the neat thing is that all of these all of these published apps are also automatically placed in the start menu so if I click the start menu and then search for Excel for example you see that I have both the locally installed Excel app and you have the one that is provided through Azure virtual desktop here and firing that up you can see how that looks let us just give it a minute or two and I'll make sure to do some water in the meantime right so now I have Excel running as a published app from my Azure virtual desktop and it doesn't really well the look and feel is as if it was locally installed for the most part like I can move around I can snap it to the end of the screen I can maximize this and so on so the user experience in this case is pretty neat and the only really way you can tell that it's running as a published app is that little remote app icon on the stock menu here or the taskbar rather so this is how it looks from a user's perspective I do want to do one more test and that is through the the desktop because you know I should probably show you how the desktops works as well so let's try to sign into my desktop now and the Azure virtual desktop pretty much shares the same control plan as Windows 365. if you watched nmi Windows 365 videos then you know that the user experience in terms like meetings and stuff is actually pretty good right out of the box and so should also be the case for Azure virtual desktop so let us just fire up teams I should have see if I have a meeting somewhere here yes so I can join that and you see that I do have the the local devices from my local device I have the the audio devices that I have locally I have the the camera and so on let's do a mute here and then do join and see how that works I do have a cell phone mounted right up here with um uh with the uh which should be joined to the meeting I don't know why it isn't let us check that out as well let's see let's do huh yeah you know the demo gods are not with us today so that was a shame huh yeah um sorry about that but you know uh this was supposed to be a demo of showing how really magnificently magnificence the meeting experience is within a teams running within Azure virtual desktop but um it is what it is today it was working so let us skip that for now and then um that was it for the client side of things so I think we actually should be going back to let me just organize my stuff here to the presentation because it is time to discuss the well elephant in the room you know how much because that's also always a question with you know Microsoft Services how much does it actually cost and with Azure virtual desktop it's actually twofold it is licenses and then you have consumption so in terms of Licensing if you are using a server-based operating system then you need to have RDS Cals with software Assurance or you need to have RDS user subscriptions and if I remember correctly the RDS user subscriptions are only available through CSP so if you don't already have a relationship with a CSP partner then you would need to have that as well so but you know we want to use a client operating system and with the client operating system the license is also changes these are the licenses you can use but to put it really short you need a license that includes windows so as you can see that would be Microsoft East 5 E3 business premium A5 a lot of different licenses and um yeah so as long as they include Windows you should be good to go but there is also a third option around licenses and that is the per user licensing this is only available for external user accounts so you know guest accounts in your Ash radio for example they can be licensed for Azure virtual desktop per user and that would entail a ten dollars for the desktop published published desktops and five and a half bucks for published apps but again this is only for external external users but it is nice to know that that is actually a feature that you can make use of assigning avd access to external users now for the consumption part this is largely only for your session hosts and the costs around them you have the compute cost for them you have the storage cost for them and you have networking cost for them but also if you like in the complex scenario use a storage account for Central Storage of user profiles then that would also incur some costs so consumption in this matter is basically everything around your VMS and the storage around them but also the networking you know egress traffic from your v-net so yeah the costs of azure version stop is for licenses and you have consumption as well and with that we are actually over in the Q a section so if you have any questions post them in the chat and I'll try and answer them as best as I can um I have a question how does it compare to Windows 365 and I I think I mentioned it a couple of times but or a time or two but it uses much of the same control plane as Windows 365 so Azure virtual desktop and Windows 365 is what I like to call Sister Technologies they share a lot of the same features and um and uh a lot of new features will be either coming to a avds at the top and then to Windows 365 like a week or two later or the other way around but I think the the key differences is well described by Microsoft that Azure virtual desktop is designed for flexibility while Windows 365 is optimized for Simplicity so if you want something really simple that's window switch dive if you want something that's flexible and customizable to your needs then that's Azure virtual desktop also keep in mind that Windows 365 is both simple to set up and to you know cost manage because you know you we saw that the Azure versus desktop that has the licenses and the consumption that's the costs for it but when Windows 360 you basically pay one license and get one Cloud PC and you know that's the cost of it so I don't know if that was a good answer to the question but it was at least another does it work with the Azure ad domain Services service well yeah it really does it does it so well actually the one back when Azure desktop first was launched back when it was called the windows version of desktop it didn't have the support for Azure ID join sessions so Azure ID domain Services was really the only choice for those businesses that were all Cloud which only had you know an Azure ID user accounts and not any AD so yeah yeah it works pretty awesome with Azure ID domain Services as well and there doesn't seem to be any more of them so yeah feel free to contact me afterwards comment on the video the recording will be here tweet at me anyone anyway wants ask questions I'll try and answer them as best as I can and uh yeah thanks for sticking around and uh cheers

Channel: PetterTech

Views: 6,768

Keywords: azure virtual desktop, azure, avd, microsoft azure, windows virtual desktop, avd setup, azure virtual desktop setup, avd tutorial, azure virtual desktop tutorial, azure tutorial, azure setup, azure virtual desktop demo, azure tutorial for beginners, azure training, microsoft azure tutorial, wvd, azure basics, learn azure, azure for beginners, azure microsoft, azure fundamentals, microsoft azure training, azure training for beginners, azure cloud, azure virtual desktop 2023

Id: 1-1SMK3nGSo

Length: 57min 32sec (3452 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 25 2023