this is a host pool i know it looks
simple
but there's a lot of things you need to
think through and in this episode of the
azure academy's az140 study guide
we're going to talk about planning your
windows virtual desktop post pools
so buckle in
i'm dean sefola and this is the azure
academy pulse pools are a collection of
one or more identical
virtual machines within a windows
virtual desktop environment and host
pools are the heart
of wvd session hosts are members of it
app groups are connected to it and
workspaces are associated with it each
host pool can have one or more app
groups associated with it which are
collections of
remote applications or desktop sessions
that your users can access and another
good thing to know is that once your
first app group has been associated with
the workspace
every other app group in that host pool
must also be associated with that
workspace
and there's many things to consider when
planning all of this architecture out
that's going to run your environment and
some of the topics go deep so we'll have
separate episodes for those
so what do you need to think about when
planning a host pool well
first thing would be around your
governance your naming convention what
are you going to call this thing so that
you have a consistent naming pattern
across
all of your host pools so that everyone
knows when they see them what they are
and what they should be doing
also your tagging strategy in a previous
episode we made a recommendation of
several
different kinds of tags that you should
consider for your environment
tags are not only metadata for your
resources but a way to add automation
on top of your wvd environment the next
thing to think about is your location
what azure region do you want your host
pool in
the reason why this is important is
because of host pool
metadata and as of today's date when i'm
recording this the metadata is only
stored in the us geography
however it has been publicly announced
on the roadmap that the european
geography will be available soon
now this is important because of data
sovereignty so if you have a particular
requirement that says you have to store
your resources in this particular
location or within this national
geography
say somewhere in europe then you need to
be sure to select that
as your host pool's location the next
thing for you to think about
is your validation settings think of it
like a
devtest qa kind of environment for your
host pools
so the workloads that are in there
should match production identically and
you should have users
actively using it to make sure that
everything's okay
why because the validation pool is going
to receive
all of the wvd updates before the
regular pools will
this is so that you can monitor those
service updates before any of them apply
in your non-validation environments so
without a validation pool
you may miss simple errors that could
have been easily avoided and now you
have downtime
or you may even have to implement a
disaster recovery plan
more on that in a second next decision
you have to make is what kind of host
pool do you want
should this be a personal desktop
environment
a pooled desktop environment or a remote
application
environment now a pooled and remote app
environment
are the same kind of deployment but the
app group configurations are different
so we'll get into more of that a little
bit later
so personal or pooled what does your
particular use case require
and your workloads may also dictate that
you need a personal and a pool
that's okay so for example you could
have a developer
and they need to have a personal desktop
and they're going to be doing a lot of
coding they need to be local admins
but then you could also have a whole lot
of office workers
who don't need all of those high level
permissions and just need to
do their job which for them could be
running a web browser some office
applications and that kind of thing and
you could do that in a
pooled environment but you're not
limited to that your pooled environment
could just as easily use
high performance gpu enabled virtual
machines
it just depends on whatever your needs
and requirements are but now let's
assume for a second that you went with a
pooled hose pool now you have a few
other decisions to make
one what is your maximum session limit
how many people do you want to have
on a single virtual machine at once what
is it that dictates how many users you
can stack onto
a single vm no matter what the size of
the vm is well it comes down to the work
what is it that they're doing on that vm
we're going to get more into this topic
in vm configurations which is a future
episode so
be sure that you've hit the notification
bell so that you know when that one
comes out one last thought here on
pooled host pools and that is the load
balancing algorithm you have two choices
breath first or depth first so what's
the difference
well let's assume that i have 10 virtual
machines and i want to get
10 users on each virtual machine well
there's two ways to manage that you can
either let the system kind of manage
itself that would be
breadth first which means i'm going to
put the first user here on vm1
the next one on vm2 the third one on vm3
etc or i could go depth burst which says
i'm going to stack
10 users here on vm1 before anybody
logs onto vm2 and of course there's
differences in the management approach
if breath will allow the system to
manage
itself more versus depth maybe in a more
cost conscious kind of model where i
want to maximize the use of that
one virtual machine before i do anything
with a second so let's now switch and
look at our personal host pools
we have a decision to make here as well
the assignment type for our users will
it be automatically
determined or will i have a direct
assignment now in the automatic
assignment again the system will kind of
manage itself but once the user gets
assigned to a vm
that one is theirs and no one else will
log on in direct assignment i get to
decide
which vm you log on to this may be
important depending on how you
set up and manage your vms for example
local admin permissions
if i've pre-assigned the admin
permissions when i built the machine
then i want to be sure that the right
person ends up on the right box
now another thing to consider in your
host pools are the rdp
properties now we will have a separate
video digging into this a little bit
later but these are the customizations
in your host pool environment
what things do you allow and what do you
block for example the clipboard
or usb devices cameras even being able
to control the particular screen
resolution size
all of that is customizable in your host
pool but they are host pool specific
i could have one pool configured to
allow printer redirection
but another pool to not allow it but you
can't mix those settings in one pool so
if you find that you need
differences in that configuration you
need more than one pool
let's talk about virtual machines the
question here
is how many virtual machines do you need
in your host pool
now remember a host pool should be a
collection of identical virtual machines
so this is one particular kind of
workload every one of them is going to
have different needs
capacity and application requirements
which will determine
your vm size number of vms and user
density so you need to think through all
of that before you build vms into your
host pool now we will have a whole
different section
talking about monitoring and a bunch of
episodes around that so i'll just
mention here that you do need to
consider monitoring when you're setting
up your host pools
and that's because we have diagnostic
settings in wvd
in all of our components and you need to
know where that data is going to go
are you going to use the native
monitoring insights
based on azure log analytics and the
azure monitor or are you going to use a
third-party integration and then where
do you need to put that data
so just know that before you go and
build your host pools because monitoring
is a key thing that a lot of people
usually forget about and that brings us
to the area of security there are
two distinct role-based access control
roles for wvd host pools desktop
virtualization host pool contributor
and reader so the reader obviously just
has permission to view what's going on
in the pool
and the contributor can make any kind of
technical change to the host pool but
they cannot change permissions
now there is another way to go and that
is resource group
based permissions for example if you
give someone resource group
contributor now they can do anything
that a virtual desktop host pool
contributor could do
but they're not limited to just doing
things on the host pool now they can do
things on the virtual machine the
network card the whatever else
happens to be in that resource group so
it depends on how granular you manage
all of your permissions in the cloud
final thing to talk about here is
disaster recovery now there's many
variations in how to do disaster
recovery so i'll give you some things to
think about
first of all if you have a dr plan
already you probably want to align wvd
as close as possible to that strategy so
that everything moves together
with that said you've got a few
different options for your host pools
the first thing to think about is how
big of a blast radius
are you defending against do we have to
defend against something going on with a
particular
service in a region or plan for the
entire region to have an issue
all of this is just a ratio of time
effort and money and at some point
there will be diminishing returns and
that's up to you to decide and we will
go
far deeper on disaster recovery in
upcoming episodes
stay tuned for those so you've got a lot
of things to go and think about
in planning your host pool architecture
and i hope i've been a help to you today
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for joining us today and i'll see you in
the next one
happy learning