- Coming up we'll look at how Microsoft is transforming
Virtual Desktop delivery by separating operating system,
user profile and app layers to radically simplify
IT management, while improving the user experience.
We're also going to show you how we have improved
the remote experience of Microsoft Teams
using Windows Virtual Desktop.
And if you're a large organization using NetOP technology
we're gonna show you how you can quickly bring your local
file shares into Azure without losing fidelity
or changing user behavior.
So I'm joined once again by the engineering leader
for Windows Virtual Desktop, Scott Manchester.
Welcome back to the show.
- Thanks for having me back Jeremy.
- So the good news here is we're out of preview.
Congratulations.
And Windows Virtual Desktop,
our fully-managed desktop virtualization solution on Azure
is now generally available.
- Thanks Jeremy and hopefully folks that are watching
have had a chance to go hands on
with Windows Virtual Desktop by now.
So as of today
you could now actually run production workloads
of apps and remote desktops using WVD.
- Right, but for your team your job is never done.
And really as a service, Windows Virtual Desktop is
on this cycle of continuous innovation.
I know there's a lot of work the team's been doing
and the team's really been focused on since the last time
we had you on the show just a few months back.
- Yeah, we have been really busy Jeremy.
We've been focused on the user experience improvements
but some of the most significant enhancements have been
focused on breaking down the composition of
the Windows experience itself,
now across the user data applications and OS layers.
On a physical device these layers are intrinsically linked
and the user experience is consistent,
every time the user logs in.
Their apps, data and
Windows experience is tied together.
In an optimized virtualization environment,
a brokering service routes the user to a virtual machine
from a host pool to a VM
with the resources available to host
that user's app or desktop workloads.
And this is likely a different virtual machine
every time they log in.
- Right, and I think one of the challenges here that
I think that a lot of people have built and with their
Virtual Desktop environments is that they want to reproduce
what's on the physical machine and that device,
really minimize their overhead in terms of maintaining an
environment that looks and feels like this.
- Exactly, we've all ready provided a mechanism for users
to separate out the data by managing the user profiles
with FSlogic technologies.
Now with FSlogic we've separated the
user profile layer from the virtual machine
and the way we do that lets users work in the way
that feels natural.
To the user it feels like you're
saving and accessing files from a local disk, but really
it's a separate virtual disk hosted on a file share that
we can mount to any virtual machine the user logs into.
Now that separates out one of the three layers,
the user profile, but you still have
the App and OS layers now deeply tied together.
Now in a shared or pooled virtual machine
this is a challenge
because each user might need a different set of Apps
and as we've mentioned before
they can be assigned to a different VM
each time they log in.
So you are left with a couple of options:
manage a bunch of unique VM pools customized for
different users' roles, and these images will all need
to be individually maintained and patched.
Another option is to overload the VM images with more apps
than any single user would need
and then hide and block unneeded apps with policies.
Now this makes your OS image bigger then it needs to be
and app licensing can get tricky.
Then one more common practice is to stream apps dynamically,
on demand or on log in.
But that requires some or all of the apps
to get cache into the OS during the user session
and this slows down apps verse load time
and it usually requires the IT admin to repackage
or sequence the app.
And you need to manage the app streaming infrastructure.
- Now I think these are all pretty common approaches
in terms of how we deliver the experiences out for users
and really do the imaging part of it.
But how do we then solve for this to make it better.
- What if the apps work like the user profile
and were stored outside the VM,
and each app attached itself,
like we attach the virtual disk of the user profile?
And you didn't need to move at binaries into the VM,
removing the need for app sequencing or streaming.
- So you're saying the apps are sitting outside of
the virtual machine, stored somewhere else is kind of
separate entities or packages that stay there.
- Yep.
And that's exactly what we've built.
And we call it App attach.
Like we did with the user profile,
we've modified Windows so the apps can be stored
off the Windows disk.
And we just need to attach the apps to the VM.
Now app groups are assigned to users,
and they're available instantly on login,
because you don't have to stream the app binaries.
And it looks and feels local to the user, and to Windows.
- Right and what all this ultimately means too,
is that the OS layer is left clean.
There's not an app payload or user profiles attached to it.
Can you show us what the user experience might look like
then with App attach.
- Sure. Let me show you the App attach experience
here on my machine.
So first off Jeremy, I want you to note the size of
the free available space.
- (Jeremy) Looks like about 28 gigs.
- (Scott) Yeah, so I'm going to minimize this now.
And we're going to be building
this whole App attach experience natively into
the Windows Virtual Desktop management experience.
But for now I'm going to run some Power Shell,
but before I do,
I want to prove to you that I don't have Power BI installed.
- (Jeremy) Okay.
- (Scott) Pull this up here,
under search and you can see: no Power BI.
- (Jeremy) Okay.
- So I'm actually going to App attach Power BI,
and I chose this application
because it's relatively large,
it's about 400 megs compressed
and expands to about 1.2 gig on disk.
Now the other cool thing about Power BI,
it's already packaged and an MSIX package,
and it's available on the store.
So, it's already complete.
So I've actually installed the application now,
or attached the application.
And if I click the start button
you can see a recently added app here is Power BI.
Now I'm going to quickly move over and show you
the C-drive size on disk hasn't changed at all.
- (Jeremy) Still 28 gigs.
- (Scott) So I got this 1.2 gig Power BI app now
attached to this VM.
So let's go ahead and run it.
Now to the end user, and to the operating system,
this looks and feels just like
any other app that would have been pre-installed.
- (Jeremy) And again the binaries are sitting
off the disk of the virtual machine.
- (Scott) That's right.
So there it is-
Power BI launch; to the user looks and feels like
the native experience.
And you'll also note that
it already has my user profile assign to it
because we've knotted the app
and my user profile together
into this composited version of Windows here.
- Very cool.
So how does this differ than from traditional app layering.
- Well traditional app layering is a great tool
to optimize the virtualization environment.
We have taken things a step further with App Attach.
We've made core changes to Windows
to support dynamic delivery of MSIX packages.
Now this is a new app delivery standard
your existing MSI's and EXE's
can also be converted to MSIX as well.
And we're also working with partners
who are already adding support for App Attach
to their existing app layering technologies.
- So this is really going to help in terms of the
admin experience by reducing the number of images,
the image size, also keeping the OS
and apps up to date for the user.
It also felt like it was just their personal desktop
with a local profile and local set of apps.
No change in terms of the user behavior.
Speaking of which,
with Microsoft Teams and unified communications clients,
there's always some challenge there
in terms of remote desktop,
what have we done there to make that experience better?
- Yeah, as you mentioned, unified communication applications
like Teams are a real challenge
within virtualized environments
because you're adding a second hop.
So I'm connecting from my machine to
the virtual machine in the cloud
and then to the end user on the other side.
And that can cause latency and other bad experiences.
So let me show you what that looks like
using a virtualization environment here.
So let's make a call with Teams
and see what it looks like, in the before example.
- (Jeremy) Yes, I'm going to join the call.
- Hey Jeremy.
- Hey there,
so I'll go ahead and start moving in front of my camera
and you can already start to see probably
a little bit of the latency in terms of me,
bringing my image up into a VM through Teams
back to another VM and then back to your machine.
- Yeah, we've all experienced these situations.
Where you're trying to have a high-fidelity conversation
with that added latency,
it becomes very awkward
and just isn't very functional for users.
And and also if you've got, you know, microphone in,
and audio, next to each other,
the echo cancellation doesn't work very well.
That added latency kind of throws a damper on that.
- That's right and nobody really wants
to hear their voice come back from somebody else's machine
and back into their machine.
So how do we then make this better
with Windows Virtual Desktop?
- So let me show you what we've done here.
So let me get out of this call here.
And I'm going to quit out of Teams.
Now again, this is an early preview
so I'm going to run some script here that's going to enable
AV redirection, so let me run this script.
- (Jeremy) Feels your just running a couple reg keys.
And this is again,
first look; this is something that's not part of
a preview or something.
- (Scott) Yeah, this will be built directly into Teams.
it will be supported with Windows Virtual Desktop.
So I'm going to relaunch Teams now.
So let's try that same call now
with Avi redirection turned on.
- (Jeremy) Okay, so there's the call,
I'm going ahead to accept.
My image should pop up in just a second there.
Alright so now you've got a camera feed of my image here
and I'm going to go ahead and do the same thing,
I'm going to wave in front of the camera.
You can see also in terms of my
latency of talking and speech it's pretty close,
from what I'm doing in real time
to what you're seeing on your device.
- Yeah, this is a much better experience
and this is pretty much
the same thing you'd see in a traditional bare metal
environment, just two machines connecting up over Teams.
- So it's obviously way faster and way higher fidelity
but how did the team get that to work?
- (Scott) Well in the before environment
we were taking the AB stream,
and it was being sent from your device to the host VM,
where it was getting encoded and decoded multiple times
before it gets to the other end of the call.
And obviously that latency reduces the quality
and performance of your video.
Now re-encoding on your VM is also CPU-intensive,
and could impact other users
who might also be on that machine.
Now with AV redirection for Teams
we essentially redirect the team's AV traffic to bypass
the Windows Virtual Desktop virtual machine,
and send the audio and video data directly
to one call client to the other.
So in our example,
my Surface is sending and receiving video data directly
from the caller instead of relying on a remoted screen
from a distant VM.
Now all this is done through web RTC.
It's like a direct connection
between your laptop and my laptop.
- And again this is much more efficient
in terms of passing the AV feed
between our two clients here.
- Yeah. And speaking of clients,
let me show you some other work that we've done
to improve the client experience.
- (Jeremy) Okay.
- so here I have our
brand new Windows Virtual Desktop client.
And I'll show you a couple of new features here.
If I go to the little wheel here you can see
I can turn on light or dark mode,
which I love the new dark mode.
I also now have the ability
to set specific settings of different machines
or host pools that I'm connecting to.
So if I right-click on this a icon here
you can see that I can use the default settings,
or if I turn the default settings off
I can do things like allow the VM to resize
as I resize the window.
Let me show you what that looks like here.
So I can go back to this VM.
And I'm going to just hit the arrow here you'll notice as
I drag the window size, that the VM as soon as I let go,
the VM will stabilize to that resolution.
So if I wanted to have multiple windows on my desktop
and have multiple machines
I could quickly switch between I can do this.
And it's real easy for me to just go back
to full screen as well.
In addition to these end user experiences
we've also provided some tools for IT admins.
We've now made it so the app can be installed
on a per user basis or a per machine basis.
This allows an IT admin to enable the end users,
without admin privileges to be able to take updates
to the application.
And we've also given the IT admin controls,
so they can control the velocity of updates
that are coming to the client app as well.
- These are going to be really welcome changes
for both end users as well as admins.
Really good stuff here.
But to help move to fully-managed
desktop virtualization service on Azure,
why don't we switch gears and talk about
what you do in terms of moving file shares,
maybe from an on-prem environment into Azure.
What are some things we can do there?
- Yeah, if you're migrating
from an on-prem environment to Azure,
you'll want to move your file shares as well
to keep your data as close as
it can be to the virtual machines.
- Right. And so we've shown Azure files
previously on Microsoft Mechanics.
And it really is a great solution
in terms of supporting
Azure Active Directory Domain Services
but if you're on an on-prem Active Directory
and really need a simple option to move your
file share volumes as-is, kind of like the volume-level
backup into Azure and maintain their paths,
all the permissions, all of the stuff for NTFS.
You can do that using Azure NetApp files to save time.
What this does here is two different things.
First, it's allowing you to lift and shift
your shared volumes into Azure NetApp files
and you can see here when I click in.
I've got a couple of what are called capacity pools.
The capacity pool is actually
a volume, in my case it's four terabytes.
That's where you can start.
And if I click into the volumes,
you can see a volume here,
and when I click into that you'll see the SMB path
to be able to reach that volume
if I'm on a domain-join machine, which is right here.
Now when I switch over to a domain-join machine,
it's just like managing a file share like
you would do on-premises, but this is in Azure now.
So if I look at my network I can see my SMB path.
I click into the volume
and the file share itself, that folder.
I'll go in, I'll see more folders,
in our case they're user profiles.
We can click the properties of that folder.
And just like I would any other Security tab
in a Windows File Explorer,
I can add permissions to it in this case
I'll go ahead and type enterprise admins.
And I'm going to check the names there.
Give permissions to that group.
I can give it full control and apply
everything just like
it's running my on-prem file servers,
but now it's all in Azure.
We've basically wired up the connectivity
between the two environments and you can see,
there's my setup folder, so everything looks
and feels just like it normally would,
but again, these files are located in Azure.
- Yeah, this is a really simple way now to lift
and shift your file shares up into Azure.
And you can do this now,
and both manage your FSlogic profiles
and your AppNet tech profiles in this file share.
- That's a really great point.
So you can see how we're really transforming
Virtual Desktop delivery, as well as
all the improvements around remote experiences
for things like Microsoft Teams.
But what's next Scott?
I know you're never done, right?
- Well, we're going to continue to make improvements
to the user experience, so working
on that user experience within
the remote desktop client application,
as well as building additional tools for IT admins to manage
your Windows Virtual Desktop environment.
- So lots of really great technologies here
but if I want to get started with Windows Virtual Desktop,
where do I get started?
- Well customers can get started today.
You can go to aka.ms/WVD,
and get all the documentation and information
you need to start your production deployment.
- Thanks Scott, and by the way one more tip
if you need help getting deployed
we've got a how-to series on Microsoft Mechanics
at aka.ms/WVDplaylist.
Of course don't forget to hit subscribe,
and from Bellevue MTC here in Washington State
thanks for watching, we'll see you next time.
(upbeat music)