- Hello and welcome to a special edition
of Microsoft Mechanics.
Coming up on the show,
we're joined by engineering lead, Kam VedBrat
and he's gonna take us on a tour
of Windows Virtual Desktop,
with all the latest updates to the service for admins.
So welcome to the show, Kam.
- Thanks Jeremy, it's great to be here.
- So thanks for joining us from home today.
By the way,
we've been following Windows Virtual Desktop super closely
at Microsoft Mechanics.
And if you're new to WVD,
it's a desktop and app virtualization service
that's hosted in Azure.
Now as a service,
it's more popular than ever
with the global acceleration really
of people working remotely.
- That's right, we have seen staggering adoption
in the last few months.
And really massive growth around the world
since we launched.
We've been focused on really supporting the momentum
of organizations who are trying to meet the challenge
of enabling secure remote work.
- And it's really amazing momentum.
It sounds like you and the team can really deliver a service
at a time when it's most needed.
- These are really unprecedented times
and we're doing everything we can to make sure
that people have a really great experience
with the service.
We've been really accelerating our efforts
to improve elasticity, to simplify deployment
and management and to optimize latency
for our customers all over the world.
Now, we talked about this a little bit earlier this year
when we had first started improving latency
by delivering new control plane instances
in the United States, in Europe, Japan, Australia,
Asia Pacific and Brazil.
But since then we've expanded our optimization
to include South Africa, the UK, France,
Germany, Norway, and Korea.
And by the end of the year, we'll have optimizations
in the United Arab Emirates
as well as in Canada and Switzerland.
So we're constantly monitoring the service on the backend
to make sure that we can keep optimizing WVD based on usage.
- And that really sounds like great peace of mind
for people who are counting on performance.
- Absolutely, it's a ton of expansion
in a really short period of time,
but we're keeping up with it.
Now, I want to talk about one more thing,
which is for governance and compliance.
We're adding the ability to store your service metadata
in different geographies.
We're starting in Europe, which we'll have
by the end of the year, but we'll have more geos soon after.
- And I can't wait to see where the service is gonna be
in the next couple of months.
This is all really great news,
I think for everyone watching.
But I also saw the much anticipated Microsoft Teams,
A/V redirect also in generally available recently.
Also a great timing for all of us who have to work remotely.
- That's right, we're super excited about this one.
Microsoft Teams A/V redirect is now generally available.
So if you haven't seen how this works,
what we do is instead of having audio and video move
between the hosted VMs, it creates a direct connection
using web RTC between your physical endpoints.
And this dramatically improves latency
and reduces CPU usage, which lowers costs.
Let me put this in context for you.
If we look in task manager, you'll see
that the Teams process is staying around 12-15% of CPU
in an unoptimized environment.
And here we have it in an optimized environment.
And Teams is staying under 1% of CPU on average.
- Yeah and that's really a huge difference,
around 1/15th of CPU utilization.
So as I like to say that this is Mechanics,
so for all the admins that are watching,
I know that we've really streamlined the setup experience.
Can you show us what that looks like now?
- Absolutely, we've done a ton of work
to make deployment easier with the new QuickStart,
which you can find at aka.ms/WVDQuickStart.
It takes you through three main steps to get up and running.
First, we walk you through your pre-reqs.
You need an Azure subscription
with the right level of admin privileges.
You have to get your active directory set up
to work with Windows Virtual Desktop.
And we have to make sure that your Azure subscription
can connect to your on-premises network
with a VNET in Azure.
Second, we automate provisioning of your host pool
with an Azure resource manager template,
along with Azure DevOps.
And this creates your Windows Virtual Desktop environment.
Finally, the DevOps pipeline will populate your environment
by adding users, application groups and assigning resources.
- Right, and this should really speed things up
as you provision Windows Virtual Desktop for the first time.
So now with the service up and running,
why don't we fast forward a few months
in to day-to-day operations?
What's new there?
- Sure, well, that's where service monitoring comes in.
We've built a dashboard with all the essential KPIs
to monitor user experience and performance.
It also lets you set up alerts for situations
where you need to take action.
For example, here's a nice overview with alerts,
health summaries and usage trends.
If I drill into Host Diagnostics, I can see things
like CPU usage and memory utilization.
These are great insights into the user experience
that you can use to take action, to improve your deployment
based on your usage patterns.
For example, you may wanna reduce users per VM
based on high CPU activity or increase density
on underutilized VMs in order to save costs.
And you can also make decisions about where
to locate resources like Vms
or storage to help improve performance.
- Right, and that makes a lot of sense.
And it's something a lot of people I know
have been asking for, but what about image management
and where those files are actually located and kept?
They're often 30 or 50 or gigabytes or more
that you'd have to move around typically.
- Well, for that problem, we now hook in
to the Azure Image Gallery Service.
So you can easily build
and replicate your VM images across regions
to speed up provisioning.
So you can see here as you build an image
in the shared image gallery,
you can define the target regions
that are needed for application.
So in this case, I'll take South Africa.
And if we add images to this gallery,
there'll be nice and close in the regions
where they get provisioned.
- Right, and one note here to be clear,
this is something that was enabled
with the new Azure Resource Manager
based provisioning model for WVD.
So if you deployed Windows Virtual Desktop
using the original process, you want to migrate
to the newer model.
But now once you're up and running,
what are we doing to make things easier then,
on the management front?
- Yes, so we've partnered
with the Microsoft Endpoint Manager Team
and we've made a lot of really great progress together.
First, Windows 10 Enterprise multi-session support
is coming to Microsoft Endpoint Manager
for hybrid AAD joined VMs.
And this will really help with policy management
and security configuration.
Let me show you a little bit of what's coming.
As you can see here in the MEM admin center,
this is a device list that has physical devices
and hosted virtual machines.
So you can make sure that your Windows Virtual Desktop Vms
are fully compliant with all the rest
of your managed Windows 10 devices.
And if we look at administrative templates,
you'll see this gets even better
with MEM's ADMX backed policies.
It has super granular controls that are built in
and always up to date for Office, Windows and Edge,
and you can even upload ADMX policies for third-party apps.
This will be very familiar if you're already running
on-prem remote desktop environments at scale.
- Okay, and as a result, there's only one place you need
to go to configure and manage device policy for Windows 10
and see their compliance status along with all the rest
of your managed devices.
- That's right.
And you can see that in MEM you're also able to use it
for software distribution.
So for shared VMs, you'll either have apps in the image
or you can customize the apps
that people see with MSIX App Attach.
- One more note there,
if you're using Configuration Manager,
it can also be used to manage Windows Virtual Desktop Vms.
But Kam, since you brought it up,
it's one of my favorite things, MSIX App Attach,
can you tell us what's new there?
- Yeah, so we've covered a little bit
of how MSIX App Attach works before on Mechanics,
but let me just recap the concept.
What it does is it really lets you separate the app layer
from the rest of Windows.
So you can then attach
externally stored application packages instantly
when the user logs in.
This means you can have a slim virtual desktop image
and customize the apps that are available for each user.
The list of apps will follow the user around
as they get assigned from one VM to the next.
- Okay, and I know for a few months we've had this document
and you can use a scripted approach,
but can you show us now how this is working currently?
- Sure, so let me start in a virtual machine.
Here I am in a Session Host.
And if you look in the apps in the start menu,
I'm gonna look for Notepad++
and you can see, it's not there.
So now I'm gonna add the MSIX package
with a brand new experience
that we've been working on in the portal.
I'll add an app.
Now I'll paste in my package location,
which is a VHD file in this case.
It can contain one or more MSIX packages.
I'll choose Notepad++,
paste in the friendly display name,
the path to the icon file that I wanna display,
I'll add the icon index, zero,
and an optional description.
So now it's configured in the host pool
with the two other packages.
Finally, and as with any other app,
I'll make sure that I've added it to my application group
and it should be available in my VM.
So let's check.
Now, if I open the start menu again, you'll see Notepad++
and then launch it and you see it works.
And you saw it only took a few seconds to set up.
- Right, and this is something that blows my mind
every time I see it.
So we're not streaming or cashing the binaries
into the VM like you might expect.
They actually stay remote and get attached like Kam said.
So now that we've got Windows Virtual Desktop up
and running, what can our admins do now to save costs?
- Well, there are a couple of things you can do.
First, if you're using persistent personal Vms
and your users don't need to be local admins,
you really should look
into using Windows 10 Enterprise multi-session.
Windows 10 Enterprise multi-session allows you
to put multiple users on the same virtual machine
at the same time to keep costs lower.
And because it's a client OS,
your client apps just work as is.
We've also been evolving our scaling automation
to help you manage costs.
As we've seen in previous Mechanics sessions,
we've talked about the different approaches to breadth
and depth scaling that help you optimize
for end-user performance or lower costs
through higher per VM utilization.
Now to help with the elasticity,
we've improved our auto scaling with Azure Automation.
So you can easily spin up more VMs when you need them.
You can find guidance on setting this up
at aka.ms/wvdautoscale.
Finally, one more thing I wanna show you
that I'm really excited about
is a new feature we've been working on
called Start VM on connect.
This allows you to enable the service
to automatically turn on deallocated VMs
when the user tries to connect.
That way you aren't paying for idle VMs
that aren't being used,
but you can still get your users their resources
when they need them.
- These are all really great ways to keep costs down.
It's great to see all the updates with the usage
that we're seeing across Windows Virtual Desktop
for secure remote work.
Now, for those who haven't started
and wanna learn more about WVD, what do you recommend?
- Well, we've just updated our learning path
for Windows Virtual Desktop to walk through the new setup
and management processes.
You can check all of that out at aka.ms/LearnWVD.
And of course you should try it out for yourself.
Use the QuickStart at aka.ms/WVDQuickStart to save time.
- Thanks, Kam, for joining us today.
And hopefully we answered all of your questions.
Of course, keep checking back to Microsoft Mechanics
for the latest updates, subscribe if you haven't already.
And thanks for joining us today.