- Welcome to Windows Virtual Desktop Essentials.
If your organization is looking for a more efficient,
productive and secure approach to desktop virtualization,
in the next few minutes I'm gonna walk you through
Microsoft's Windows Virtual Desktop solution
on Microsoft Azure.
It offers a fully managed
desktop virtualization solution in the cloud.
And the good news is,
it works with all your apps and devices.
As you can expect, we have full-featured
native client support for Windows, Mac, iOS and Android,
as well as new HTML5 support
so that you can access remote desktops and apps
from almost any modern browser.
So why desktop virtualization?
Well, for a while it's been looked upon as a solution
for enabling central management security
of your users' desktops
and also with less IT management overhead.
Now this approach separates your operating systems,
data and apps from local hardware,
running them instead separately on a remote server.
Now the main appeal is that you can separate
the compute environment from user devices
so that the risk of confidential information being left
on a personal device is greatly reduced.
You can also make sure that your virtual machines run
in close proximity to apps and services
that connect to your data center or the cloud.
End users have the freedom to connect with any device
over the internet and for IT, you don't have to worry
as much about the device that's connecting,
so long as the network connection is secure.
That said, setting up a desktop virtualization environment
has traditionally been expensive and also complex.
Users have often lacked the productivity experience
of a locally-provisioned desktop,
and it can take weeks and sometimes months
to get a successful implementation up and running.
Now through Windows Virtual Desktop,
all of this complexity goes away.
We give you a remote desktop infrastructure
that contains the roles that
you would have had to manage at scale.
Things like your gateway, broker, diagnostics,
load balancing and more,
as a fully-managed service on Azure.
All your VMs in the Windows Virtual Desktop service
communicate over secure outbound connection
and you benefit from unlimited capacity
and you can also choose any size VM in Azure
and vary the density of users based on the workload.
We also give you more choice
on how you distribute users across those VMs.
For example, you're not limited to a Windows server OS
in cases where you want to assign
more than one user per virtual machine.
With Windows 10 Enterprise Multi-session for example,
you can gain efficiencies
by having multiple users on a single VM
and unlike multi-session Windows server implementations,
it has a support for modern apps like OneNote
and Office 365 apps and we're gonna talk
more about that in a minute.
Importantly, you still have full control over VHD images
and you can use pre-built images in Azure
or bring your own custom images.
You can deploy a full desktop, remote apps or both
and of course, you can scale up or scale down
as needed while paying only for what you use.
Now for users, things get even better.
Now there's no compromise between
their Virtual Desktop productivity experience
and what they would experience
if they had a locally-hosted desktop running
on their PC: it's the same.
Now, in Windows 10 for example, your full collection of apps
whether they're 132 line of business apps
or UWP apps, those will run.
Apps are fully integrated with the start menu.
You can pin them to your taskbar
and the only indication the app is virtual
is through the glyph.
You can copy, paste or snap apps side to side.
They look and feel like local apps.
And you don't even need to be on a PC.
You can also be on a Mac, iPad, iPhone,
your Android phone or even the browser,
the experience is gonna be the same.
What's more, the integration with FS Logics Technology
and Windows Virtual Desktop makes the experience
of working with stateful apps painless.
Now for example, you can fire up Outlook
and be productive right away without waiting
for the mailbox to populate.
Now this is because as a user,
your profile data is containerize in a separate virtual disk
and that's gonna attach in real time to any session
on any VM right as you log in so it feels like your inbox
and all your local files are persistent
as if they're running from the local C Drive.
Now OneDrive files on demand also benefit from FS Logics.
Users have full access to their files stored
in OneDrive and File Explorer
so their on-demand files are always available
and launched right away.
Behind the scenes, the OneDrive Sync Client
and Windows 10 Enterprise multi-session work together
to support OneDrive files on-demand.
WVD utilizes the default one terabyte storage
that users have as part of their Office 365 subscription
to let OneDrive cash their most recently accessed files.
Now this means that when a user selects an on-demand file,
it immediately hydrates using the high speed network
and infrastructure across the Microsoft Cloud
to ensure that files move as fast as possible
to become locally available.
And of course you can ensure that data never lives
on the consuming device
by configuring information protection controls
and you also have complete audit-ability
of your environment.
That said, identity is the cornerstone
of the user experience and also protecting your data.
Azure Active Directory or Azure AD unlocks a secure,
consistent sign-on experience for users with the ability
to roam from device to device, and it ensures
that only the right people have access to apps and data.
You can also configure multi-factor authentication.
This lets you take advantage of conditional access controls
that determine access based on who you are, your device,
the types of apps you're accessing and your location.
Now Windows Virtual Desktop
even supports passwordless authentication approaches
including biometrics such as with Windows Hello.
Now beyond user authentication, Azure AD also allows you
to manage admin privileges with role-based access controls
that govern your Azure resources.
If you're already using Azure or using Office 365
or any other Microsoft services,
you already have an Azure AD.
If not, there are numerous options available to
sync Azure AD with your organization's directory service.
You can learn more about this
in the preparation episode coming up on Microsoft Mechanics.
Now you can manage WVD from within the Azure portal
along with all your other Azure services.
And there are a few additional areas
where Windows Virtual Desktop will really help
drive operational efficiencies
for your Virtual Desktop environment.
As I mentioned before, you can assign multiple users
to a single VM using a client OS, not a server OS.
Now Windows Virtual Desktop uniquely breaks away
from the one user per VM model of the past
for client operating systems
to deliver the only Windows 10 multi-session experience.
Now this is still supported, but increases your overhead.
So for example, in a one VM per user model,
you typically size each of the users VMs
based on anticipated peak usage.
But in typical workdays, a task or an office worker
will rarely consume peak capacity of that VM.
Now with a multi-user model, you can deploy a single VM
with sufficient CPUs and RAM to have several users
on a single virtual machine.
Now this reduces your resource requirements significantly
while providing a great user experience.
Next as I mentioned earlier, you can assign collections
of VMs which we call host pools to specific users.
Now this could be by department and what that means is
if one department needs VMs with more horsepower,
such as your creative design team
that might require fast GPUs,
you can select the right VMs for their needs.
Now we also give you the options to load balanced users
on your virtual machine host pools.
So for best performance, you can configure Breadth mode.
Now that evenly allocates your users across the host pool
for your workload and if you wanna optimize
for cost savings, you can configure your VMs
for Depth mode load balancing.
And in this mode,
the load balancer fully allocates users on a single VM
before moving to the next one.
And with our scaling tools, you can automate provisioning
of additional VMs as needed
once a specified threshold is met
to support incoming demand.
Now we also have pre-built
Azure resource manager templates available
to create and update your host pools consistently.
That said though, one of the biggest areas
where you can reduce your overall running cost
is with storage.
Using OneDrive available in virtualized scenarios,
it's possible to have terabytes of files per user
in an Office 365 service
and to not incur additional storage costs.
Now the combination of the virtual machine infrastructure
hosted in Microsoft's Cloud and the connection
to unlimited OneDrive storage is both fast and bottomless.
Now this enables you to also provision
smaller virtual machines and storage footprints per user
to save costs while still providing
best-in-class file access performance.
And with the addition of Azure files,
you can centralize your organization's file shares in Azure
using Azure File Sync.
This can be used to sync and migrate
on-premises file share data to Azure and accelerate access
to content from your WVD session hosts.
Finally, the separation of user profiles
from virtual machines using FS Logics
helps reduce your overall data storage footprint and costs
without compromising performance or app compatibility.
That was a quick overview
of Windows Virtual Desktop on Microsoft Azure.
This allows you to take a secure and efficient approach
to centrally managing your PC and device's state
without compromising your user productivity
inside your organization.
What's more, if you still need to run Windows 7 desktops,
WVD offers the unique advantage of allowing you to run them
in the cloud for up to three years without having to pay
for extended security updates,
all past the January 14th, 2020 end-of-support date.
You can also migrate your existing RDS deployments
and use your existing licensing
to bring those environments to WVD.
So next, please continue to watch our series
for hands-on guidance on the steps to prepare, deploy
and optimize Windows Virtual Desktop for your organization.
Thanks for watching.
(light electronic music)