(bright music)
- Welcome to Azure Virtual Desktop Essentials.
If your organization's looking for a more efficient
and flexible approach to desktop virtualization,
without compromising control,
in the next few minutes,
I'll walk you through Azure Virtual Desktop,
Microsoft's Cloud VDI solution
with centralized security, management,
and scalability built-in.
By design, it works across your devices and apps
with full featured experiences
for Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android.
Also, the web client allows you
to access your remote desktops and apps
from almost any modern browser,
keeping your user productive from anywhere.
So let's dig into the top things
Azure Virtual Desktop brings you.
First and foremost,
it helps remove much of the expense and complexity
of building and managing your own desktop infrastructure,
and you only pay for what you use.
It comprises the roles
that you would've previously had to manage yourself,
such as your gateway, broker, diagnostics,
load balancing, and more,
but as a scalable managed service on Azure.
And you can provision the compute
and configure user experiences to meet your needs.
Because it runs on Azure,
you benefit from Azure's expansive global footprint,
and its mission critical infrastructure
can be configured for increased resiliency.
For example, for any single instance VM,
Or you can use Availability Zones
to host redundant VMs across physically separate locations
in the same region that comprise one or more data centers
to guarantee 99.99% availability.
You still maintain full control
over service configuration and management
with lots of options for deploying services,
implementing identity and file storage.
Azure Virtual Desktop really is flexible
and configurable to your needs.
You can choose from hundreds of VM size
and performance options,
and vary the density of users on your VMs
based on the workload.
And you can configure remote app experiences as you need to,
allowing users to access app windows individually
without exposing the entire desktop.
There are other unique benefits too,
such as being able to distribute users across your VMs
for greater efficiency,
something only previously offered with Windows Server.
You can have multiple users simultaneously logged in
to a single VM with multi-session capabilities,
exclusive to Azure Virtual Desktop.
And this works with both Windows 11 and Windows 10.
Also, because you're running on a Windows Client OS
compared to Windows Server,
you've got more flexibility
to run a broader set of apps for your users.
Speaking of which,
let's talk more about the user experience
and how Azure Virtual Desktop can be configured
to protect your users as they work.
For users, there are no compromises
between their virtual desktop experience and a physical PC.
On Windows, remote apps can be fully integrated
into the start menu
and you can pin them to the task bar.
It's also easy to multitask,
and if your policy permits it,
copy and paste between app Windows,
as you're seeing here with Windows 11.
And as mentioned, Azure Virtual Desktop can be accessed
from virtually any device platform or modern browser.
And even though Azure Virtual Desktop
can be set up using using shared VMs,
whereas a user,
you might access a different VM each time you log in,
you shouldn't feel it,
because with FSLogix profile containers configured,
it will connect VMs to your personal profile and app data
with each log on.
It just works like your local PC.
For example, when you open Outlook,
you'll see your inbox and calendar right away
without having to wait for the mailbox to populate.
This makes the experience of working with stateful apps,
as you move between shared VMs, pain-free.
You can also use device peripherals like webcams
or other attached USB devices,
and Universal Print
allows you to use network connected printers.
And of course, by configuring
optional information protection policies,
you can ensure that data never goes to the local device
used to access your virtual desktops.
In fact, Azure Virtual Desktop
offers unparalleled configuration and management options
to let you maintain full control.
From the Azure Portal,
your experience starts with deploying a collection
of virtual machines, or host pools,
that your users will have access to.
Here, you've got the option
of assigning personal VMs to individual users
or pooled VMs that are shared with multiple users.
Again, you control the size, performance level,
as well as the OS image used for each VM.
You also control whether users can access full desktops
or individual applications.
And to ensure that your VMs
meet your desired user experience,
Azure Virtual Desktop provides real-time views
of service insights,
and it's fully integrated with Azure Monitor.
You can get full diagnostics
for your host pools and workspaces
to ensure it meets the bar for performance and connectivity.
And by monitoring VM utilization,
you can make informed scaling decisions.
That said, how you configure
and integrate your identity services
is the key to how users will securely access
their virtual desktops.
Azure Active Directory unlocks
a secure, consistent sign-on experience.
You can require multifactor authentication,
along with conditional access to streamline experiences.
Then, by using Azure AD Join for your host pools,
you can run all identity and access management services
in the cloud
without the need for hybrid connectivity
to your local directory service.
And importantly, unlike a less secure
open remote desktop protocol port,
which waits and listens for connections,
Azure Virtual Desktop uses reverse connect transport
for outbound connectivity over an encrypted connection
during a user session.
Of course, once authenticated,
there are a few options for accessing data and files.
For pooled or shared VMs,
user profile data can be containerized
in a separate virtual disk,
which will attach in real-time to any session,
on any VM,
right as you login.
If you're using OneDrive,
your on-demand files are always available
and will launch right away.
And if you're using on-prem file shares,
now Azure File Sync lets you replicate them in Azure Files,
so that your virtual desktops up can access them seamlessly.
There are also broader Zero Trust
and intelligent controls available to you too.
So to protect against rootkit and bootkit based attacks
for Windows 11,
Trusted Launch with virtual TPMs
enable secure boot protections
to make sure that nothing has been modified
before launching the VM.
Azure Virtual Desktop
also has several platform-specific encryption options,
which will work with your key management service
such as Azure Key Vault.
And you have the option to use Azure Confidential VMs,
where all data and memory is encrypted
with a hardware root of trust,
requiring attestation to protect data and code in use.
As a domain joined, or Azure AD joined machine,
as you'd expect,
you can implement granular controls using group policy
to enforce security baselines in the VM itself.
And by using Microsoft Defender for Cloud,
the built-in intelligence continually assesses
the security of your virtual machines.
These and other protections can ensure that your VMs meet
even the most stringent security requirements.
To truly take advantage of paying for what you use,
there are also lots you can do
to optimize the costs and utilization.
In fact, this is another area of tremendous flexibility.
Importantly, you can proactively balance
performance and utilization costs
by using the exclusive multi-session experience
to assign multiple users to a single VM
and combining it with load balancing controls
with options for depth first to load each VM up individually
until it's close to capacity,
then provision another host for additional users,
or breadth first,
which evenly spreads users across multiple available VMs.
There are also built in scaling plans.
These allow you to scale out
the number of VMs in a host pool
during peak usage time,
and scale them back in,
for example, during off business hours or weekends.
That was a quick overview of Azure Virtual Desktop,
Microsoft's Cloud VDI solution.
There's more to come in our series
with hands-on guidance on the steps and your options
to deploy and manage the service at scale.
And there are useful resources at aka.ms/AVDDocumentation.
Of course, keep visiting Microsoft Mechanics for more,
subscribe if you haven't already,
and thanks for watching.
(bright music)