New Updates for Windows Virtual Desktop including Admin Portal

In order to help remote workers efficiently, I would like to share with you latest updates that WVD Team have made to manage Windows Virtual Desktop Service in Azure.

• Windows Virtual Desktop Admin Portal  now in Public Preview.
• Windows Virtual Desktop Service has been expanded to additional locations
• Additional Security capabilities
• More …

Windows Virtual Desktop is a desktop and app virtualization service running in the cloud and delivers simplified management, multi-session Windows 10, and support for Remote Desktop Services (RDS) environments.

For more details about Windows Virtual Desktop, please refer to Windows Virtual Desktop documentation

In this post, I will go through new improvements for Windows Virtual Desktop that have been released for Public Review on 30th April 2020. refer to Windows Virtual Desktop updates for admins video for more details.

Windows Virtual Desktop Service Instances

Microsoft has expanded WVD service globally to include it in more locations which bring data sovereignty and reduces latency for customers.

You can use Windows Virtual Desktop Experience Estimator to estimate quality of user experience received when connecting Windows Virtual Desktop

Windows Virtual Desktops Admin Portal

Many of admin tasks for Windows Virtual Desktop were available using PowerShell and Azure Active Directory. Now, those operations are brought into a unified portal in Azure. This approach helps in improving creating host pools, managing App Groups, RBAC and Monitoring.

Workspaces

Once you have provisioned VMs, you can start building Application Groups and assign users to applications and desktops in Workspaces.

Tags

Now, you can apply tags for window virtual desktop host pools to help you identify provisioned VMs for the host pool and use it for additional operations such as automation runbook.

Azure Active Directory Groups

Now, Application groups and desktops can be assigned to users and groups in Azure Active Directory.

Role-Based Access Control

Such like other Azure Resources, host pool role-based access control can be managed from WVD admin portal.

Monitoring

Now, like any other resource in Azure, we can integrate WVD service with Log Analytics to collect diagnostic logs related to WVD management, Errors, Checkpoint, Connection and host registration.

Also, using Azure Monitor you can get more insights on health and performance of Windows Virtual Desktop resources.

Auto Scaling

new improvement have been added to scale out virtual machines using Azure Automation which help in managing cost and performance in different scenarios such as business hours or number of sessions and CPU core.

Currently this is running using PowerShell script published at https://aka.ms/WVDautoscaling which will use Azure automation account to build dynamic scaling script using Logic Apps.

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In Summary, Windows Virtual Desktop helps companies address specific business needs and few scenarios where visualization can make impact. We can apply virtualization to enable and address different work loads from employees who have light touch on resources to intensive work that requires high performance experience. Windows Virtual Desktop help Employees stay as productive with a virtualized experience on a PC, phone, tablet, or browser as they are with a physical PC sitting right in front of them

Thanks you for reading.