In the last article I touched on the cloud services models being Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS). In this month’s blog post, I’ll be touching on Azure Virtual Desktop, or AVD in short – which is a combination of both IaaS & PaaS.

Before we delve into AVD itself, I think it’s important to understand the benefits of virtualization, which as its core can increase IT agility, flexibility and scalability while optimizing costs. We get greater workload mobility, increased performance and availability of resources, and automated operations – they’re all benefits of virtualization that make IT simpler to manage and less costly to own and operate. There are some additional benefits such as:

  • Reduced capital and operating costs.
  • Minimized or eliminated downtime.
  • Increased IT productivity, efficiency, agility, and responsiveness.
  • Faster provisioning of applications and resources.
  • Greater business continuity and disaster recovery.
  • And simplified data center management.

So those are some of the benefits but when is virtualization useful and what are some of the use-cases?

  • One is keeping data and organizational resources safe while enabling appropriate access by a variety of users. A key area for this is compliance with industry regulations (financial services, healthcare, and government) – an example is that for the financial services, providing a device that is managed and locked down might not cut it compliance wise, they need certainty that the data and IP stays within a sandbox environment to meet those regulations and stay compliant. It’s important because it only takes one device with data on it to go missing and you have a data breach.
  • There is also short-term employees and contractors – how do you enable businesses to accommodate for seasonal workforces and contractors fast and in a cost-effective manner. Covid was and still is a prime example, there were some businesses who contracted while others needed to expand and expand fast. AVD was used a lot in this scenario, along with other vendors like Citrix.
  • Supporting specialized workloads, so design and engineering, legacy and line of business applications, and software development and testing.
  • And another key use-case is streaming apps to deliver SaaS solutions to your employees and customers.

So, what is AVD? AVD is a born in the cloud managed-platform service offering on top of the Microsoft Azure Cloud. All the traditional infrastructure services, such as brokering, web access, load-balancing, management, and monitoring is all setup for you as part of the control plane offering. It also gives you access to Windows 10/11 Enterprise multi-session operating system – which is completely optimized for the sake of Microsoft 365 services, such as Outlook, OneDrive, and Teams.

AVD basically is Remote Desktop Services but using modern infrastructure, Microsoft are calling this RDmi (Remote Desktop Modern Infrastructure) which is combining traditional Windows desktops and apps with modern cloud concepts.

 

What does this mean though?

  • It’s a globally available virtual desktop and remote application offering delivered on Azure.
  • It’s designed as a Remote Desktop Services replacement and is the direction of virtual desktop technology going forward from Microsoft.
  • It offers a special edition of Windows 10 & 11 for Azure that allows for multi-session capabilities on the operating system and is optimized for Microsoft 365.
  • AVD is both a product and an infrastructure offering:
    • AVD’s management infrastructure is provided as a Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering where the management layer is offloaded to Microsoft, as opposed to hosting this in your own data centre in an RDS scenario.
    • AVD typically refers to Windows 10 & 11 deployments, though it can be used in an RDS style deployment where the operating system is server based, with no need for your own broker, load balancer, and gateway.
  • There are 2 main offerings available, Personal and Pooled:
    • Personal is 1 user to 1 Virtual Machine, it’s basically their own dedicated Virtual Machine.
    • Pooled is multiple users to 1 Virtual Machine, several users sign in and share that Virtual Machine

 

What are the benefits of Azure Virtual Desktop? I see 3 key areas:

Intuitive user experience:

  • Connect to AVD from any platform and location, at any time using a modernized protocol which adapts to bandwidth conditions and has fast load times and log-on times with containerized user profiles.
  • Ease adoption anxiety or lag with the familiar and friendly Windows interface as AVD enables a multi-session Windows 10 experience that is optimized for Microsoft 365, what this means is that the users get the look and feel they are familiar with along with a native Office 365 experience, this includes optimizations across Teams, OneDrive, & Outlook.
  • Scalable performance, you can expand with demand and need on the fly using the Azure platform, so scale up and down as required ensuring the users experience isn’t impacted by resource constraints.
  • Simplified management through the Azure Portal along with third party integrators like Nerdio, Citrix, & Hydra.

Security:

  • It’s integrated with the security and management of Microsoft 365, allowing you to utilize Multi-Factor Authentication, Conditional Access and RBAC with Azure Active Directory.
  • Ensure security and modernization with a standardized, global cloud which can give end to end security by using the Azure Platform.
  • Rely on powerful cyber defence operations with over 3,500 full time security professionals, 6.5 trillion global signals daily, and a 1 billion annual cybersecurity investment.

Optimise Costs:

  • On the infrastructure costs side – you’re utilizing the elasticity of Azure through their Autoscaling technology, you can schedule VMs to start and stop based on business hours to reduce cost and complexity as well as demand you’re seeing from users, ensuring you’re only paying for what you need when you need it.
  • Licensing costs – there isn’t multiple licensing costs involved with AVD, it’s based on eligibility. With a Windows 10/11 multi-session scenario we don’t require RDS CALs, we don’t license the operating system either as it’s provided as an entitlement.
  • Labour costs – better time to value using the scale of Azure, you aren’t relying on lengthy hardware procurement for your infrastructure, so you can free up engineer's time to work on other projects increasing your scale and capabilities.

 

The last item I want to touch on with AVD is around the licensing and eligibility criteria:

  • It is required per user.
  • AVD is provided as an entitlement with eligible licenses, the most common is Microsoft 365 based licenses for Windows 10/11 deployments and where the sweet spot is in terms of the fullest feature set and value is Business Premium.
    • For Windows Server deployments they require RDS CALs with active Software Assurance (along with an RDS license server, which also needs an OS license).
  • Virtual machines outside of AVD do require separate licensing.
  • There is also per user access licensing for external users – this is designed for SaaSifying apps that are being shared to external users.

If you’d like to chat more around AVD, whether that is on the sales or technical front, or for a cloud assessment to get into pricing, then please come have a chat to myself or anyone else in the Azure team here at Dicker Data.