(upbeat music)
Hello everyone.
My name is Kushmeen Kambow,
and I am a Program Manager in Azure Stack HCI team.
In this session I will show you
how to set up Azure Virtual Desktop
on your on-premises infrastructure with Azure Stack HCI,
and enable secure remote work in minutes.
We'll start off with looking at
what is Azure Virtual Desktop for Azure Stack HCI,
then we'll deep dive into the Architecture Diagram.
We'll look at the deployment method
and Azure Virtual Desktop tile in the Get Started tab,
followed by a quick demo and then we'll recap.
Azure Virtual Desktop is a cloud VDI solution.
It provides an efficient and flexible way
to manage your desktop and apps virtualization
without compromising on control.
Since it's a managed service
customers now don't need to worry
about setting up and maintaining
the VDI infrastructure layer anymore,
which is one of the major pain points
with the traditional VDI solution.
Also, customers can take advantage
of Windows 11 and Windows 10 multi-session client experience
which comes exclusively with Azure Virtual Desktop.
But not everything can be in public cloud
due to compliance and regulatory reasons,
data locality requirements and latency sensitive workloads.
These are essentially some of the reasons
why some of our customers,
even though realizing the benefits
of a managed cloud VDI solution
were not able to move to it.
To solve this problem, we're bringing
Azure Virtual Desktop for Azure Stack HCI,
and bringing these two services together.
This offering is called Azure Virtual Desktop
for Azure Stack HCI, and with this
customers can enjoy the benefits of a cloud VDI solution
while being in full control of their data
and full control of their Azure Stack HCI cluster.
With Azure Virtual Desktop on Azure Stack HCI,
you will get the benefits of a cloud-based VDI solution
and no overhead of managing infrastructures
like brokers, gateways, et cetera.
While staying in full control
of your HCI Cluster management as well as your data.
You will get unified management experience
across Azure and Stack HCI, which is in Azure.
You can now pack more users in a VM
while leveraging Windows 11, windows 10 multi-session
and lower your cost, as now you will need
less number of VMs to deploy and hence less hardware.
Multi-session is only available
in Azure Virtual Desktop, in Azure
and on Azure Stack HCI.
Another way to achieve high-user density
is by sharing GPUs, using GPU partitioning.
Imagine using one GPU across multiple VMs
and now each VM can have multiple users
with multi-session OS.
You can now see how this multiplies very quickly.
Microsoft 365 and Teams are optimized
to provide the best experience for our users.
With RDP Shortpath, users can get
a consistent low-latency access to their session host.
So imagine if your users and your session host
were on the same network, either because they were both
on premise or connected over a VPN,
RDP Shortpath basically short circuits that communication
and provides for a great low-latency access.
These were some of the benefits
of using Azure Virtual Desktop on Azure Stack HCI.
Let's take a look at a high level architecture diagram.
As you can see
Azure Virtual Desktop Service is living in Azure Cloud.
The service takes care of your brokering, your gateways,
load balancing, monitoring capabilities, et cetera.
Hence it's a managed cloud VDS service
provided by Microsoft.
Long below in the diagram you can see
your on-premises infrastructure
which is Azure Stack HCI.
Azure Stack HCI can have one or more nodes running on it.
Running in the cluster is your virtual machine.
What I want to call out is that
there are two agents running on this virtual machine,
as your arc agent and as your virtual desktop agent
and both of these need to talk
to Azure Virtual Desktop service.
This machine is joined to an on-premises AD,
which is getting synced to an Azure Active Directory
using AD Connect.
When a user logs onto their end device
using a remote desktop client or a remote desktop tool,
raises up the combination of their desktops
and applications,
based on what Application Groups they're part of,
which Host Pool they're part of,
and this experience could be a single session experience
or a mobile session experience or a shared experience.
So this was a brief high level architecture diagram
for you guys, so that you have an understanding
of how these two services
talk to each other and work together.
So with all the information that I have provided you so far
you must be wondering,
how can I deploy Azure Virtual Desktop
on Azure Stack HCI?
So there are a couple of manual steps
starting with creating the virtual machine
on your HCI cluster, using Windows app and center.
You will then onboard that VM to Azure
by installing a connected machine agent
or Azure Arc agent on it.
You will then manually create Azure Virtual Desktop objects
through portal and objects
like Host Pool, Workspace and Application Group.
You will then download and install
Azure Virtual Desktop agent on the virtual machine
that you have just manually created,
and will register that machine as a session host
using these agents.
You will also do an on-premises to main join of the VM.
So as we can see, there are a lot of manual steps
which can be very tedious and cumbersome.
So you must be wondering, is there an easier way to deploy
Azure Virtual Desktop for Azure Stack HCI?
We are bringing to you Azure Virtual Desktop workload tile
in Stack HCI overview page.
It's a lightweight Portal experience
which uses the power of Azure Resource Manager
or ARM template for an end-to-end deployment.
So you will see how just in a few clicks
you can do a full deployment of Azure Virtual Desktop
on Azure Stack HCI.
So on your Azure Stack HCI cluster matters
registered to Azure,
you will now see a Get Started tab
in your clusters Resource space.
Under the Get Started tab,
you'll see an Azure Virtual Desktop Tile.
Using this tile, you can do an end-to-end deployment
of your environment.
This tile brings in Arc VM management feature
of Azure Stack HCI, by using Azure Marketplace images
so that now you can download and use the same images
on your on-premises cluster as we do in Azure Public cloud.
Second, Arc VM extension which integrates
with tools which helps you to run configurations
after a VM is created, and third ARM resources
so that every on-premises VM
and its desk, and it's network gets promoted
as a first class Azure resource.
The style also gives you information
about what prerequisites are to be met.
There are two prerequisites.
The first one is that there should be
at least one Windows image, which can be taken care now
using the Azure Marketplace images.
And the second one is this should be Arc VM management.
It also provides links to
understand each of these prerequisites in more detail.
If either of the prerequisites are not met,
the tile will not allow you to proceed with deployment.
So, let's take a quick look at the demo now
and get more in depth knowledge about the process.
You go to your Azure portal and your Stack HCI Cluster.
In the overview page there's an Get Started tab
and you'll see Azure Virtual Desktop tab.
Prerequisites are not met in this case
and you cannot proceed with the deployment.
Clinging on prerequisites,
you'll see that Arc VM management is not set up
and there is a link to the setup kite.
All the information of how to set up
Arc VM management is there.
There is a requirement to set up Arc resource bridge,
custom location,
creating a virtual switch and so on.
And this guide can be followed for that setup.
Also, there's not a single Windows image on this cluster.
So now, let's see how that can be done.
We have now set up Arc VM management on this cluster
which is not part of this demo.
The only prerequisite not met
is not having a Windows image.
As you can see, there is a link that brings you
to downloading an image from Azure Marketplace.
Once you click on it,
a new window opens to create an image.
You will select the name for it,
you will select which marketplace image you want to create
or download, and then you'll click on next.
Once the validation passed, you'll hit on deployment
and this image will get created on your cluster.
As you can see now, all the pre-requisites are met
and it allows us to move forward for the deployment.
Coming back, I have now entered all the details
which are needed in this arm template
like Host Pool name, VCPU count, image ID, et cetera.
Once the details have hit on review and create
and the validation has passed.
Once the validation passed,
click on create and that is it.
The deployment is in progress.
Once the deployment is completed,
you can see that it has created a Host Pool,
Application Group, a Workspace
and then also it has created one VM network interface
and three custom extensions on that VM.
If we go back to the Host Pool,
we can see there's one total machine created
which is a DemoDay machine.
We can see the configuration of the VM here
in portal and also that the guest management is enabled
along with the three extensions custom script,
domain join and Azure Monitor.
Coming back to the Application Group,
there's a default application group
that is created as part of the template
and that's Desktop Application type.
I've also created a second application group manually
and this one has a few applications
like Excel, PowerPoint and Microsoft Teams.
Three users have been created
in the on-premises active directory
being synced to Azure Active directory using AD Connect
and they're part of either one
or both of the application groups that I've shown.
As you can see, each user will see a different combination
of apps and desktop, based on their application groups.
I'm also able to log in onto these applications
for these different users.
I can see total sessions, active sessions
as well as disconnected sessions on a VD portal.
And this how you can deploy Azure Virtual Desktop
for Azure Stack HCI
and manage your desktop and acts virtualization
from virtually anywhere, in a truly hybrid environment.
I hope you enjoyed the demo.
So moving along,
let's do a quick recap of Azure Virtual Desktop Tile.
So it helps you to discover Azure Virtual Desktop
easily on Azure portal.
You just go to your Stack HCI overview page,
and under the Get Started tab, there it is.
The tile helps you to identify prerequisites
and if they're met or not met.
It provides information
about which prerequisites are not met
and it won't let you proceed otherwise.
The prerequisites are that there should be
at least one Windows image,
and there should be Arc VM management set up on the cluster.
If either of these are not met
it will provide you information about how to do so.
And third, ease of deployment.
Using a single arm template
you can do an end-to-end deployment
and also you can use Windows 10
or Windows 11 multi-session images
which can be directly downloaded from Azure Marketplace.
You will also in this template,
be able to join the VM as a session host
by running custom script extension,
but all of this is part of the ARM template itself.
So to recap, discoverability,
identifying missing prerequisites and ease of deployment.
These are some of the resources which will help you
learn more about Azure Virtual Desktop
for Azure Stack HCI in terms of deployment, prerequisites,
understanding the concepts and so on.
I hope that this information will be useful for you.
So this is how you can deploy Azure Virtual Desktop
for Azure Stack HCI
I hope you found this information useful.
Thanks for watching.
(upbeat music)