Azure Virtual Desktop is a combined cloud counterpart of virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), Remote Desktop service (RDS) and app virtualization. Azure Virtual Desktop enables you to easily maintain your desktop image, applications and users. Now you also need not worry about managing resources like RDS gateways, licensing, and load balancing. The following are the top five advantages of Azure’s new Azure Virtual Desktop services:
1. Range of Potential Uses
The number of use cases for AVD is infinite. For example, remote workers can be securely provided virtual desktops using your existing Active Directory for authentication, thus allowing users to access their desktops from home via the Internet. Applications can be installed on AVD hosts and published to user groups to reduce maintenance and management.
AVD is a global service from Azure. AVD hosts can be deployed to multiple regions worldwide to support your users globally. Being able to provide virtual desktops in the same geographical areas as your remote users ensures a great user experience. Do you have any special departments that require high computing power? It is possible to provide different calculation and storage performance SKUs for different groups of users. Training or test environments can be deployed with AVD to test new applications or policy settings.
2. Ease of Management
The AVD Service manages the RDS infrastructure, so you only need to manage your users, applications and virtual machines. RDS components such as gateways, brokers and licenses are provided by the avid service and no longer require management. If you already have a Microsoft 365 license, this includes AVD licensing for Windows 10. With the latest AVD release (spring 2020), AVD components are now Azure Resource Manager (ARM) resources and can be managed within the Azure portal or via PowerShell. This makes it more convenient to manage AVD. For example, users can be assigned to individual desktops or pools of desktops within the portal and through Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) group subscriptions.
Automatic scaling of avid pools is available to turn avid hosts on and off based on user session counts and busy hours. It saves costs by turning off virtual machines when they are not in use and turning them back on as soon as users start logging in.
3. Windows 10 Multi-Session
Windows 10 Enterprise, Windows 7 Enterprise, Windows Server 2012R2, 2016, or 2019 can be used as AVD hosts. However, a major advantage of AVD is the availability of the Windows 10 Enterprise multi-session operating system. This OS support allows multiple users to log into the same Windows 10 VM. When compared to alternative VDI systems, multi-session functionality offers considerable cost savings. Standard virtual desktop systems allocate a separate virtual computer to each user. On the other hand, several users are allocated to a pool of computers while utilizing Windows 10 multi-session with AVD, sharing resources (and expenses).
4. Image Maintenance
Every AVD deployment starts with a virtual machine image (VM image), whether it’s a common Azure market image or a “golden image” that the IT department creates specifically for the business. When it comes to” Golden images ” there is a lot of administrative effort and many dynamic parts that go into the creation, maintenance and distribution of these images while keeping track of all the changes; this can be a busy and time consuming task for businesses of any size. This is where Microsoft Azure shared image gallery and Azure DevOps come in handy to provide an automated and simple way to create, maintain, support and replicate these “golden images”. Shared image gallery helps to overcome many obstacles associated with managing and distributing images worldwide while offering version Management in one place. Some benefits include:
- Ease of administration
- Versioning and grouping of images for different environments, e.g. (development, testing and production)
- Replication of the Gold image in different Azure regions so that the same version of the global image can be deployed in all regions of Azure
- High availability of images
Premium storage and replicas for fast AVD and scale set deployments
- Automatic installation of desired applications such as Office 365, Microsoft Teams, Google Chrome and Business Line and custom apps.
- Automatic way to install updates for software and operating systems.
- Automatic way of configuring software and operating system (firewall, antivirus behavior)
- Repeatable process with repeatable results
- Change tracking
- Automatic image publishing and shared image replication in gallery
5. User Profile Storage
To use pooled Windows 10 multi-session desktops effectively, shared storage for user profiles is a necessity. A user can access a different VM every time they log into AVD, so their user profile must be available and responsive. Desired Azure Storage SKU and data redundancy options can be configured to meet any availability requirements. Each user profile is stored on file share and mounted on user login in AVD host. The user is not able to tell if they are using a remote profile – it seems like the profile is local to the machine. Profiles are managed using FSLogix which is easy to deploy and manage.
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