The AVD Admins Super Power!!!

you know the biggest problem with Azure virtual desktop and Windows 365 is it's your hosts now building them is great we can do it by the thousands but once they're deployed you're kind of on your own and we're going to change all that with ABD image templates and all this is building on my last video on the Azure image Builder portal and I've got a few big announcements to share with you on how this is just the beginning of a big change to avd and I'll share some of that throughout the video now over in the avd portal on the left we have a new item Custom Image templates so let's create one and right away we have the option to start from an existing template which is an awesome upgrade because image Builder itself can't update a template today but first we'll start fresh and then come back to this part at the end so give it a name and then select your subscription Resource Group and region and then select your managed ID now this is a prerequisite for image Builder to work and it's where you create a custom role and assign that role to a managed identity and I covered all that in that deep dive video I did last week and since we have so much to cover here let's move on now the source image for this build can come from the Azure Marketplace or an existing managed image or the Azure compute Gallery which means you can start from your existing Custom Image and then use this process to make new image versions which is really cool but we'll start with the marketplace today and I'll select Windows 11 multi-session 22h2 with office apps and notice right over there this is going to be a Gen 2 VM because it's coming from a Gen 2 image which will become important later next you want to choose how the image will be saved now if you're using Windows 365 there is no support for a compute Gallery yet so you're going to need this top section for a managed image but ABD can use the gallery or you could just do both that way you've got the same image used for both services so up here you'll select the resource Group and give it an image name and a location and then an output name then you scroll down and select your gallery which of course building one would be a prerequisite to using it here along with the image definition again covered in my last video and you'll also need a version number here with a major minor and Patch version as well as an output name now as for the replicated regions I only recommend using one this way the process will finish faster and if you run into any problems you didn't waste the last four hours waiting on replication so I'm going to choose the option for no for excluding from latest so that I can deploy this right away with my pools but it's generally suggested you leave this on yes for updating an image version so that way you can do some testing before rolling it out everywhere and as for the storage type it should almost always be standard lrs unless you're doing things zonally then click next now this is the max time that the build will run before it's stopped even if it's in the middle of processes so your total build time will be how long your scripted install of all your customizations which we'll talk more about in a minute and you're gonna love it for that whole process to just finish so the default here is 240 minutes which I think will be good for now next you need your VM size which you can click here and there's recommended ones for Gen 1 and Gen 2 VMS but if you don't like either of those click right over here select the size that you think fits your needs and then hit select at the bottom oh just be sure that uh this VM size supports the VM generation that you're using and remember this VM is only going to be alive for a short period of time during the Imaging process so you could really go big here and finish a bit faster and it'll only cost you a few pennies more now if you're using a Marketplace image as your Source your OS disk must be at least 127 gigabytes but if you need more performance on your storage end you just make this disk larger Now by default the image Builder process is going to create a resource Group that starts with it underscore and then have a long string after it and that's where it's going to work all of its magic and do all the processes and then capture that as an image so the Staging Group option here is where you can specify an existing Resource Group to use instead of the it underscore one and that has a lot in common with the virtual Network option but by default a temporary v-net will be created in that staging Resource Group and that'll be where the VM lives and does all its processes but you can select an existing virtual network if you need access to existing resources to complete your build like if one of your apps that you're going to install has to be downloaded from your own file server now if you want to do either of those things you're going to need your managed ID to have permissions to access it so open another tab here and at the top search for managed identities and when you take a look at yours over on the left click Azure role assignments at the minimum you should see the resource Group here where your image is going to end up living and you're going to need to add some more so click up here now the scope should be Resource Group and the subscription will be selected for you automatically then pick your staging Resource Group and your role needs to be contributor then just click save and repeat the process if you want to add the resource Group where your virtual Network lives this is where the fun begins here you can add your own publicly available scripts into your image just click over here and then give it a name and then give it the URL for the script now I'm going to discard all that because there's something even more awesome behind door number two click to add a built-in script now just look at all that foreign this is stuff that you guys have been asking for for years it's like having your birthday Christmas and anniversary all rolled into one and it's just check boxes I love that now I'm not going to go through all of them but here are some of the highlights like languages there's a ton to pick from or how you could disable storage sense for your multi-session VMS so OneDrive doesn't have a problem now FS Logix is already pre-packaged into your image but here you can download the latest version set your profile size and specify your FS logic share path and you can enable your session host for Azure ad Kerberos with one click or how about teams with AV redirection and don't forget about your session timeouts this takes your idle users and disconnects them until they hit the next limit when they be logged off so that you can do all your scaling and reduce your cost then there's the windows optimizations which takes all the normal Windows processes scheduled tasks and services that users really don't need in a shared environment and removes them all so you can have a slim and trim VM and get more density out of your hosts and finally Windows updates now checking this box is a huge Time Saver not only will it install all the outstanding updates today but this means that next month and the month after that and after that you could change nothing else in your image just go back and rerun the process with one click and you'll get a brand new image version with all the updates from this month packed into it ready to go this is awesome and it's just the beginning my next video on this topic will take this updated image that we're about to create and automatically update your host pools so click the Subscribe button and the notification Bell because you're not going to want to miss it now when you're done checking all your boxes here and having fun click save at the bottom and there's everything you asked for now before you click next take a second and think about all the steps you're asking image Builder to do how long is that all going to take and does that line up with the build Timeout on the last page but if you need to change yours now's your chance then click next we want to add all of our tags as you always should and then click create now in a minute or two the hard part here is done you've got your image template but we're not done yet there's one more thing we need to do and that's check the box for your template and click Start build this will submit the template to the image Builder service and make all that magic happen now if you look at your staging Resource Group or you'll get a brand new one that's the it underscore group you see all your stuff is getting built so while that's cooking let's go back and look at updating a template so jump back to the avd portal Custom Image templates click to create a new one give it a name and then click right here to browse now I've got another template that's already gone through the build process and there's all of its details here's where you can change the original Source image that you were using in this template to the one that you just created using the image Builder process set your build properties just like before make any customization changes you need to just be sure that Windows update is definitely checked for all the benefits I mentioned earlier and then click create and there's your new template getting ready to do its thing now back in our staging Resource Group once the process is done the only thing that you should be left in here with is a storage account and that's going to hold all the log files from the build back in the resource Group where your image was going to land you've got a new image version for your gallery and you got this managed image for Windows 365. ready for you to import into InTune and this ABD customization layer on top of the image Builder portal is going to save you so much time and effort and this is just the beginning because the team is coming out with that other feature soon that will take these new images and automatically update your host pools with it so you don't have to until that's available you'll want to watch my deep dive on the image Builder service so that you understand everything that's going on under the hood and happy learning

Channel: Azure Academy

Views: 12,351

Keywords: Custom image template, avd custom image, azure virtual desktop custom image template, avd image template, azure virtual desktop, azure virtual desktop image template, AVD CIT, AVD gold image, avd golden image, azure virtual desktop custom image, azure virtual desktop gold image, azure virtual desktop golden image, Windows 365, Win365, Azure Academy, The Azure Academy, Azure, Microsoft, WVD, Windows Virtual Desktop, Cloud PC, yt:cc=on

Id: QxRb9sV3tHU

Length: 9min 59sec (599 seconds)

Published: Tue May 09 2023