In my previous blog I went over accessing Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) with a new modern experience, that in my opinion is far more user friendly than your typical Remote Desktop Services clients and adds in more features, all which help with end user adoption, and for administrators, makes it much easier to setup and manage, giving you more piece of mind. I also touched on the client connection sequence to AVD from the end user’s perspective and showed cased off some of what this looks like in terms of our users actually accessing the resources they need to do their jobs.

But what are our options in terms of the clients available, which ones should we be looking at, and what devices can our end users access it with? Firstly, the Remote Desktop app for Windows is no longer being updated with new features by Microsoft and support for AVD will be removed in the future, so that crosses that options off (it also didn’t support Teams optimization so may not have been the best option anyway).

That still leaves us with a few options:

  • For Windows: Windows Desktop Client (confusingly enough in the docs it’s also called the Remote Desktop client for Windows) which supports running Windows 10/11 (including IoT) and Windows Server 2012 R2/2016/2019. The newer client which is the Azure Virtual Desktop Store app for Windows (this is currently in preview) supports running Windows 10/11 only – more on these options soon.

  • Web Client: The Web Client lets your users access AVD resources directly from a web browser without needing to install a separate client. You simply browse to https://client.wvd.microsoft.com/arm/webclient/ via a supported web browser (while any HTML5-capable web browser should work, Microsoft officially support Edge, Chrome, Firefox and Safari).

  • macOS Client: The Remote Desktop client for macOS supports any of your Apple based users, running macOS 10.14 or later.

  • iOS/iPadOS Client: The Remote Desktop client for iOS and iPadOS continues to support your Apple based users but on smartphone or tablet devices, running iOS 15 or later (iPhone) or running iPadOS 15 or later (iPad).

  • Android/Chrome OS: the Remote Desktop client for Android and Chrome OS supports your remaining user base, for smartphones or tablets running Android 9 or later, and Chromebook running Chrome OS 53 or later.

 

For most of the client options, the choice will be clear as your users will have a certain operating system on their device which will dictate which client they need to use. What about Windows though, especially in the case of Windows 10/11, as we effectively have two options available to us now. Well firstly, as I mentioned the newer AVD Store App for Windows is still in preview, so maybe hold-off rolling that out to all your users and test with a subset after doing your own testing of course. But just because it’s in preview doesn’t mean we should ignore it altogether.

The newly launched AVD App is now available for download in the Microsoft Store as well as having the option of using Intune to install it. The AVD App has feature parity with the Windows Desktop Client but also offers a range of new capabilities, and now these aren’t groundbreaking capabilities, but it does add some nice features for our users and removes some pain from admins. Users can download the app themselves from the Microsoft Store, letting them get on with it and removing a possible help desk call to get it installed or assistance finding the right client for them, updates are automatic which is a win-win for both users and admins, users’ get the latest and greatest features as they come and admins don’t have to worry about patching, admins can roll-out the app via Intune with the WPM integration, and users have a better experience with the option of being able to pin apps to their start menu directly from the client. I think you’ll find that more and more features will be available to this client in time, improving the experience for both users and admins.

 

 

How do all the clients compare, you might be asking? Well, it should be no surprise that for Windows based devices on the Windows Desktop Client and AVD Store App, they have the broadest range of support across both features and redirections, though the other clients still have a decent range of support. There a quite a few tables with comparisons detailing all of this, so instead of copying them below, you can check them out here at Compare the clients.

For thin clients, most modern ones are supported, it’s best to check first though before assuming, as some older devices might not have support from their respective vendor. Microsoft have a list of partner thin client devices which you can check out here à https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-desktop/users/connect-thin-clients. If you find your thin client isn’t supported and you can’t update them just yet due to things like budget constraints, you can either use the Web Client with an HTML5-capable web browser (check that the features available are suitable first) or you could also see if Citrix supports them and then use Citrix to overlay your AVD deployment.

A lot of what I have covered is detailed in Microsoft’s documentation, Azure Virtual Desktop for users, which is relatively new and definitely worth having a good read over, it also includes How-to guides, which you could take and re-package as your own documentation for your end users.

As always, if you’d like to discuss this in some more depth, or anything Azure related, then please reach out to myself or anyone else in the Azure team here at Dicker Data.