(pop techno music)
- Hello and welcome to Microsoft Mechanics Live!
Coming up, we're gonna take a look
at Windows Virtual Desktop,
a new remote desktop solution on Azure,
and we're gonna show you
how you can now use Windows 10 Enterprise
to allow multiple users,
which used to only be possible on a Windows Server,
and we're gonna show you steps for getting the service
up and running in minutes
and, as you migrate to Windows 10,
we're also gonna talk about how you can
now run Windows 7 if you need to
and benefit from three years of extended security updates
with Azure.
To do all this, I'm joined by my partner in crime here,
Scott Manchester, from the desktop virtualization team.
Welcome.
- Thanks, Jeremy, good to be back.
- Thank you.
So again, a lot of great news to talk about
and I think that a lot of people are probably
in the process of upgrading their Windows 7
or earlier versions of Windows 10 machines
up to the latest and greatest,
and they might be looking at virtual desktops solutions,
or desktop virtualization.
How does this new option with Windows Virtual Desktop
change things?
- Well if you are working on an upgrade
from Windows 7 or older to Windows 10,
or you're working on a migration
from your own data center to the Cloud,
Windows Virtual Desktop now provides a new option
that minimizes your IT admin overhead
and provides a cost effective and more secure solution
to remote applications and desktops to any endpoint.
Last year, Jeremy and I were here on stage,
and we talked about RDMI,
which was a set of Azure app services
to manage your virtual environment.
Well, this is evolved now based on feedback from you
and other customers into a fully managed Azure service.
Additionally, with Windows Virtual Desktop,
we allow you to run both remote apps
and desktop sessions on Azure, with Windows 10,
with multiple simultaneous users.
And this now enables you, as an IT admin,
to deploy Windows 10 Enterprise
with either persistent desktops
or non-persistent, multi-user Session Host farms.
- Right, this significantly reduces the overhead
for our IT admins because Microsoft is managing
that virtualization infrastructure,
all the servers that you'd have to do in the past.
So what's in the benefit of architecting
for multiple concurrent users
against a single OS or single VM?
- It really comes down to resource utilization.
In a single VM per user model,
you typically size each user's VM
based on their anticipated peak usage.
But in a typical workday,
a task or office worker rarely is consuming
the capacity of their VM,
but you're still paying for that
peak processing power and memory.
So let's consider a real world scenario.
So let's say we have 24 users
and their peak usage would require two virtual CPUs
and four gigabytes per RAM per user.
So instead of having 24 dedicated machines
with a total of 48 virtual CPUs and 96 gigs of RAM,
with Windows Virtual Desktop
and Windows 10 with multi-user capability,
we can deploy a single VM
with eight virtual CPUs and 32 gigs of RAM
and host all 24 users on this single VM.
And with this configuration,
we have reduced the resource requirements
by more than 80%
and still providing a great user experience
for those users.
- It's really an awesome amount
of resource and cost saving that's gonna go out:
96 versus 32 gigs.
You know, and fewer CPUs.
But can IT then adjust the behavior of this?
- Absolutely.
We've built this to be flexible,
so you can choose any size VM
from the Azure catalog
and vary the density of users on the VM
based on the type of workload their running
and we're gonna give a demo of that in a minute.
And you also have agility
in how you distribute the users across these VMs.
We have several modes for load balancing users
across the host pool.
So let's say you want to optimize your
deployment for performance.
So for a group of 120 users, you spin up five VMs
for users to log into.
For best performance,
you can clear our load balancing algorithm
to Breadth Mode and with Breadth Mode
we evenly allocate the users
across these VMs to distribute the workload.
But if you wanted to optimize for cost savings,
you can configure the host pool
for our Depth Mode load balancing.
And in this mode, we'll fully allocate users
to one VM before moving to the next.
Combine this with our scaling tools
and now you can spin up addition VMs as needed,
once a specified threshold has been met,
to support the incoming demand of users.
We provide these scaling tools,
but you can create your own
based on your own personal needs.
And this flexibility allows you to optimize
for both cost and performance
while still ensuring users are getting a great experience.
- Alright but I want to talk about this multi-user mode.
What are the other advantages,
from a Windows 10 perspective, for multi-user?
- Well the main advantage is consistency.
Unlike Windows Full Server,
which was traditionally used for multi session mode,
Windows 10 Enterprise was released
on the semi-annual channel.
So for you, as IT admins,
this means testing and validation
is greatly simplified because Windows Enterprise
is released on a consistent case now
for your desktops, your laptops,
and now your virtualization environment.
And for users, this means they get a consistent experience
across their personal desktops.
For example, a user can now have access
to modern apps like Edge, Cortana,
and universal apps as well,
in a multi session environment.
And Windows 10 Enterprise multi-user is highly optimized
to run Office 365 applications
like Outlook, OneNote, and OneDrive
in a non-persistent, multi session environment.
- Right, so I see the advantages
of using Windows 10 multi-user,
but from an IT admin perspective,
and I think everyone here watching is an IT admin,
how do we actually manage all of this,
- Well Windows Virtual Desktop produces the overhead
in managing your virtualization environment.
We provide the remote desktop infrastructure roles
such as your Gateway, Broker, Diagnostics, and Web.
They're now all offered as a complete service
on Azure and it's designed
with simplicity and security in mind.
And you keep your virtual network secure now
because we establish an outbound connection
from your environment to the service in Azure.
- [Jeremy] Very cool.
So what's the responsibility then,
as an IT admin,
what do I actually do then day-to-day?
- [Scott] Well this means you, as an IT admin,
you are in control of your Windows images,
applications in our host pools,
and you can use your existing tools
like SCCM and Intune to manage those.
- Alright, so no need to look after
all of those infrastructure roles,
keep those servers patched,
all the things that you would've had to do,
but what are your options then
to run VMs in this environment.
- Well, we'll have a complete set of images in the gallery,
but you can also upload your own custom image as well.
And ultimately, you only need to pay for the resources
that are consumed in your subscription.
So the IaaS that you're using to host these
apps and desktops.
Everything else is provided with the service.
- Right, so I've got an idea now
of what Windows Virtual Desktop is
and I think everybody else does.
Does anybody want to see a demo?
I think a few people want to see a demonstration
of this working live.
Let's do it.
- [Scott] Alright, so let's switch over to my machine here.
So here I'm in the Azure portal
and all I've done here is I've clicked
create a new resource,
I've typed in "windows virtual",
searched through the entire Azure marketplace catalog
and found this new option
which is Windows Virtual Desktop.
Now this will be released when we go in public preview
but, for now, this has been whitelisted
into my subscriptions.
So I'm actually gonna go through the process
of creating out very first host pool.
So I'll click create here and let's do this live.
- [Jeremy] Alright, so what is a host pool do then exactly?
What are we doing here?
- [Scott] So a host pool is a collection of VMs
that you can build for each of your different departments
that host either apps or full desktops
and allows you to customize the size of the VM
for the particular workload that you have configured.
So if you want to set up VMs for your IT department,
and these guys need big VMs
and they need admin privileges,
then you can create a host pool for them
that's the right size for their workloads.
Maybe your task or office workers,
you wanna put them on a multi-user Windows 10 image
and maybe get a higher density.
Maybe three or four users per core.
So you can create different host pools
that have different apps
and a right size for the workloads they're running.
- [Jeremy] Very good, okay.
- First off, lemme do this.
I'm gonna put in one or more UPNs for the admins
that would be responsible for managing this service.
I'll just say admin, a little ctrl + V there.
Now I'm going to create this host pool.
Let's say we want to create a host pool
for the engineering department, right.
So I'll just give this host pool a name
and now the assigned users here.
I can put in individual users or I can put in a group.
So I'm gonna say this is my ENG group.
And from here, I'm choosing the subscription
that I'm gonna deploy this into
and I can assign the resource group.
So for simplicity, what I usually do is
I give this the same name as the host pool.
And I'm gonna put a number just to make sure it's unique.
And then I choose a location
that I wanna deploy this into.
So that's it for the primary setting up the admin part.
So now I'm gonna go through and configure the VMs
that are gonna be part of this host pool.
And as I mentioned earlier,
I can use one of the images
that we have in the Azure gallery.
You'll notice that I have some new options here.
Windows 10 multi-user,
Windows 10 Enterprise of course,
Windows 7 Enterprise,
and then, of course, we support server 2012 forward
all the way up to 2019.
- [Jeremy] So you can bring your own images
or you can use the ones in the gallery like we see here.
- [Scott] Yeah, if you're an IT admin
and you wanna take one of these images,
create a VM, customize it,
load your apps, set your group policies,
do all that stuff ahead of time,
you can simply just give us the URI,
where that image is,
and we'll build a host pool based on that image.
But for now, we're just gonna choose
one of the defaults in the gallery.
I'm gonna choose the standard SSD hard disk type.
Now here is an interesting algorithm
that we've created to make it easier for these IT admins
to right size their VMs.
So I can choose the workload type here.
And if you use tools like Login VSI,
you're kind of familiar with this
personas of different users that have
different capacity needs,
and if you hover over our little info text here
it kind of gives you some other insights
about what we're doing.
But let's say that I wanna support 100 users
with a medium workload.
Well, that's telling me I'm gonna need four VMs,
four D8SV3s.
Now this is a default VM size that we've chosen,
but you can override all of these
and put in the number of machines you want,
you can choose any VM in the entire gallery,
including end skews.
So if you wanted to set up a host pool
for your design team, for instance.
- [Jeremy] Right and you can have GPU support.
- [Scott] Yeah, you get full GPU support
and you can give them a one to one VM mapping
or you can use multi session as well.
So I'm just gonna keep the default here
for the DS8V3 and I'll hit okay.
And then everything is gonna look very familiar
to you after that because now all that's left
is for me just to determine the type of disk.
I'm gonna use manage disk here.
And then just setting up the domain
that I'm gonna add these to.
So let's just say we wanna add them to our avdcontoso.com
I didn't spell that right
but here then I just provide the username and password
for the admin that has privileges
to add these machines to that domain.
And then I click okay and then create
and then it's just a standard VM creation process
which takes about 20 minutes.
- [Jeremy] Right right.
And this took us a couple of minutes here
to do basically an Azure resource manager template
to build that out.
But this would've taken a long time
to get all of this running in the real world.
I remember personally building out environments
using all Windows or Windows plus partner solutions
that take a week sometimes to provision.
This is about five minutes
and you can get something up and running.
- Yeah and what this does is this sets up
a preconfigured host pool
that's sharing the full desktop.
Now you can go inside of our tools
and configure this to make it an app environment,
single user, multi-user, and even set that
breadth and depth mode way of doing our load balancing.
- So what does it look like then once
everything's running and you've been running
for a week or a month?
- Sure, so I'm gonna go back to my dashboard here
and now we're gonna simulate like a day 100.
So I've had this service running for some time,
I've set up multiple host pools,
and this is a reasonable example
of what you might see
where I've got different resource groups.
You can see I've named the resource groups
based on the teams within my organization
that are using it.
So here's a resource group for my finance,
Or go over here, I've got one for my accounting org,
and then down here I got my IT org.
So maybe my accounting and finance,
they can run Windows 10 multi-user.
They're running line of business apps,
they work in a multi-user environment,
and I can provide a great experience for them there.
But maybe my IT org needs to have admin privileges
and we need to give them larger VMs
so this host pool can be set up for more of a VDI scenario.
All that flexibility there.
- [Jeremy] Very cool, very cool.
So we've seen creating host pools,
adding users to the applications.
Now that you've got an entire remote desktop infrastructure,
you've got it up and running in just a couple of minutes,
you set this up in this case using marketplace,
but I'm guessing a lot of people out here,
anybody use PowerShell or other methods?
- [Scott] Powershell?
Sounds familiar.
- [Jeremy] Jeffrey Snover was here last night.
- [Scott] He'd be ashamed of you guys.
- So can we use PowerShell or other approaches
to build this out?
- Yeah we really spent a lot of time
talking to admins and understand the tools
that they use for building out deployments like this.
So Windows Virtual Desktops starts off first
with a full set of REST APIs.
So you can automate this and integrate it
into your existing IT automation tools like ServiceNow.
We also have a complete set of PowerShell cmdlets.
We have this Azure marketplace tool
that will be available when we go into public preview
later this year.
And then when we GA, we'll be developing
a full Azure portal UX experience
for both management and deployment.
So pretty much any tool you want to use
to build out your deployments,
you can use those with Windows Virtual Desktop.
- [Jeremy] Very cool.
And I think this might have been the first time this week
where we actually started with the admin experience.
But why don't we show what the end user experience
then looks like using this.
- [Scott] Absolutely.
We know our audience, we know they want
to see the admin experience.
Alright, but let's show you guys
what it looks like in real world.
So here I've got PowerPoint running here.
You can see PowerPoint running pretty smooth.
I'm gonna pin it to the left.
I'm gonna maximize it here.
- [Jeremy] That's a remote app basically.
- [Scott] This looks and feels like a remote app
and if you look carefully down in my tray here,
you'll see it's got a little glyph over it
telling me that it's a remote application.
Without that little glyph, I probably wouldn't even know.
It looks and feels like a native application.
And all I had to do to get this running
is put in my email address
into the remote app and desktop control panel
and automatically all those apps
that were created in that host pool,
were automatically added to my start menu.
So here you can see even the most recently added
since I just subscribed to this feed earlier today.
You can see there's everything there.
And the name of that host pool was avdcontoso
and that's the name of the folder that was created.
So it gives me a way of organizing the apps
that are created for each host pool
but everything aggregates together in my start menu.
So I can see different host pools.
I can see full desktops.
So let's run another app and let's see how fast this is.
So you see just how quick I'm launching this application.
Again, these look and feel like native apps.
I can copy and paste between them
if my IT admin is configured to enable me to do that.
And the beauty of this is it just looks and feels
like a native application.
I'm getting a great Windows experience as a user.
- [Jeremy] Right and last time you were on the show,
you actually talked about HTML5 capabilities
with remote desktop.
Is that something we can do here as well?
- [Scott] Yeah absolutely.
We brought all those rich RDMI capabilities forward,
we've got a full web interface.
In fact, I've already set up an account for you.
Why don't you show them what this looks like?
- [Jeremy] Okay, let me try on my machine
to see if I can sign in here.
- [Scott] Well now, of course,
this device is an unmanaged device.
So this could be a laptop from a friend.
- [Jeremy] This is literally an unmanaged device
that we use to do demos on Microsoft Mechanics.
It's had all kinds of people on it
and it's not joined to any domain.
- [Scott] Now because you're on an unmanaged device,
and an untrusted device, we've set the policies
with our AED for this domain
that it's gonna require multi-factor authentication.
So if things go well, then you should get
a two factor challenge here.
- [Jeremy] I got the phone call, so that's a good sign.
I'll put it on speaker.
- [automated Speaker] Thank you for using the
Microsoft sign in verification system.
Please press the pound key to finish your verification.
- Alright let's see if that worked.
- [automated Speaker] Your sign in has been verified.
Goodbye.
- [Jeremy] And there we go.
We're inside.
Awesome.
So it's secured by Azure active directory.
You can clap, c'mon.
(audience clapping)
- [Jeremy] That was probably Joy in the back
saying "I got Azure AD and RDS working together."
Okay, so now let's go ahead and fire up a session desktop.
And I can use the host clipboard and host printer
if my admin allows that to happen.
So I'm gonna go ahead and click allow myself
and the nice thing is it's got
clipboard and printer access against my host machine.
And now it's gonna ask me one more time.
And the nice thing was
because I did do that clipboard thing,
I was able to just paste that in there.
- [Scott] Cheated.
- [Jeremy] I'm not that fast of a typer,
I wish I was.
Alright, and now I've got a Windows 10 machine
running inside of Windows 10.
Lemme just go back to the host for a second
so I can full screen here
just so it looks a little bit nicer.
Alright, so even within the website in a website.
Okay, so I'm gonna go ahead and close out of that.
Now the nice thing is, I can go in
and, one thing I couldn't do before,
especially if I was in a multi-user instance
of a virtual machine,
I couldn't launch Edge.
So now I can actually launch Edge
and you'll see that it will even take me
to the best page right now on the internet
which is the Windows Virtual Desktop preview page.
But, question, now that I've got all this here
and I've got some things in my clipboard
or I've got some items that I've been working on
inside the virtual machine,
will any of that then reside back on the host,
let's say if I'm in a hotel kiosk
or somewhere else accessing this environment,
what happens?
- That's the beauty of using virtualization.
It provides a great security boundary.
So even in my case, when I was running these apps
that look and feel native,
when I'm done there's no residual data left behind.
So I can keep all my corporate assets protected.
This enables me to bring my own device,
share a device, just use a browser.
I can pretty much get in on any machine
and get access to these corporate resources
and my IT admin knows that my assets are protected.
- [Jeremy] And of course, I think that a lot of people are
on their way to Windows 10 and modern desktops,
but I've got a few apps that I have around,
maybe they don't work in Windows 10,
or the ISB makes me buy an upgrade that's super expensive,
or it's not supported in Windows 10,
what do I do then?
- Yeah we understand that there's a lot people
that are working on your migration
from Windows 7 to Windows 10,
but if you still have workloads
that have dependencies on Windows 7,
you can now take those Windows 7 workloads,
you can move them up to Azure
as part of Windows Virtual Desktop,
and you'll get the free Windows 7 extended security updates
after we go end-of-support in January 2020
with Windows 7.
So a really great option if you still got some
Windows 7 workloads.
Then give those users brand new, shiny Windows 10 machines.
- And it's all part of Windows Virtual Desktop?
- [Scott] It is, it's included.
You just pay for the IaaS.
- Very cool.
So thanks for joining us today, Scott.
Lots of great updates.
Hopefully everybody loved what they say today,
what do you think?
(clapping) - [Scott] Thank you.
- [Jeremy] And hopefully everybody online is happy as well.
So when will people be able to start trying
Windows Virtual Desktop for themselves?
- You can start later this year.
You'll be able to use that as your marketplace tool,
those REST APIs, and all the other tools we talked about
to build out your own deployments.
That'll be available later this year.
If you go to this link here,
you can sign up to get notified when the preview goes live.
- Cool and of course we'll keep tracking all the updates
and of course keep watching Microsoft Mechanics
for the latest updates across Microsoft,
and follow us on Twitter and subscribe to our YouTube.
See you next time, goodbye for now.
(clapping)
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