Hello everyone,
I recently had a chat with my friends from Nerdio and we were talking about the big announcement from Microsoft last year. Off course the conversation was about Azure virtual Desktop going Hybrid.
There is a lot of buzz around this announcement, but what exactly does it mean for the AVD world, for existing customers and for new customers. The full announcement can be found here.
In this blog post I’ll give you more information about the announcement and what the benefits are.
Let’s start with a little history lesson. A lot of companies started their VDI journey with the help of Remote Desktop Services, Citrix or VMWare Horizon running desktops or remote apps on on-premise hardware. This meant that customers had to buy their own hardware on hosting it in a datacenter. The customers also had the need for IT people to manage the environment and specifically the control plane.
Microsoft launched Azure Virtual Desktop or Windows Virtual Desktop how it was called on first release and it rapidly come worldwide adopted with the Covid pandemic. It became the standard for companies who needed to deliver a desktop or remote app to employees who needed a secure workstation to work from home.
One big advantage that AVD has over its competitors is that customers don’t have to control the central services like the gateway or the broker as you can see in below image.
As from the beginning AVD session host run in the Azure Cloud. This gives us the option to scale in and out based on user demand.
Two years ago Microsoft released support for Azure Local. This enabled organizations to run AVD session hots on Azure Local enabled systems. This was a great solution but it required extra resources to be deployed like the Azure Arc Resource Bridge.
Now let’s jump over to the announcement of Microsoft at the last Ignite. Microsoft is enabling Azure Arc Enabled servers to be used as AVD session hosts. With this feature organizations can leverage their on prep hypervisors like Hyper-V, VMware vSphere, Nutanix. This is very useful for organizations that have already done an investment in hardware.
Microsoft has chosen several launch partner for AVD Hybrid:
- ControlUp
- LoginVSI
- Nutanix
- Nerdio
This will solve an issue for a lot of customers that have latency requirements for their applications of data sovereignty requirements.
Important to know is that when AVD Hybrid is released, only 2 OS types will be available:
- Windows 11 Enterprise
- Windows Server 2025 with RDS CAL’s
As you can see there is no support yet for Windows 11 Multi-Session.
Prerequisites needed before you begin
Before we can begin to deploy session hosts on-prem we need to register some resource providers in Azure on our subscription:
- Microsoft.HybridCompute
- Microsoft.HybridConnectivity
- Microsoft.GuestConfiguration
- Microsoft.AzureArcData
Next to the resource provides, the IT admin needs to ensure that the required URL’s are reachable for both AVD and Azure ARC.
Deploying and managing AVD Hybrid Session Hosts with Nerdio
Now that we have talked about the requirements, Lets’s see how Nerdio can help you to easily deploy and manage the AVD session hosts.
Nerdio is already capable of doing this for session hosts running on Azure Local so doing AVD Hybrid is easy of them.
You will be able to create a new hybrid host pool and add session hosts to it. Nerdio will ensure that the Azure Arc Connected Machine Agent is installed and also the AVD Azure Arc extension. This last extension will enable new but also existing servers t be used as AVD session hosts.
With the help of Nerdio organizations will be able to use a single pane of glass for AVD, whether it’s to deploy and maintain AVD running in the cloud or on-prem.
If you are looking for extra information around it you can also watch the Youtube video from Dean Cefola. You can watch it here.
The full article about AVD hybrid from Nerdio can be found here.
Stay tuned for more blog post that are coming when more info becomes available about AVD on hybrid infrastructure.
Until next time!