to assess and migrate your client virtual machines
and their related dependencies to Azure,
using Azure Migrate.
Azure Migrate is a central hub to discover,
assess and migrate workloads to Azure.
It provides tooling and monitoring for both Microsoft
and partner migration services for moving servers,
databases, websites and virtual desktop infrastructure
to the cloud.
You can find more aka.ms/azuremigrate.
Now today I'm going to focus on the steps used
for migrating your virtual desktop infrastructure.
Now when migrating VDI, there are two primary paths.
You can either migrate your existing host infrastructure
to new Windows Virtual Desktop host infrastructure on Azure,
and tailor your VDI images that you already have
to the new environment.
And this is great for shared virtual machines.
Or you can also choose
to replicate existing persistent virtual machines
on the new infrastructure,
which really works well for user-dedicated personal VMs.
In both scenarios, Azure Migrate provides the tools
to support your migration and even helps when you need
to migrate dependent apps and services that are running
in your server VMs.
And if you saw our last how-to for Azure Migrate
for migrating servers at aka.ms/MechanicsAzureMigrate
that process to migrate persistent client VMs
shares many of the same steps.
So first, we're going to set up the prerequisites.
And then next we'll set up Azure Migrate.
Then we'll discover the different VMs
and their composition and how they're being used.
Then you'll review the assessment
and if you're bringing over persistent VMs,
you'll replicate them, then test your migration
and finally migrate them to production.
Now this process will use the same Azure migrate server,
migration tool for replication, testing
and the production migration,
which also works for client operating systems.
And to save time, I'll focus on what's different
from the client OS perspective.
And if you're migrating infrastructure
and tailoring or building new images
for Windows Virtual Desktop,
the assessment tool from Lakeside
will give you all the information needed,
to make any necessary changes to your images
or build new ones, based on detailed inventory
and usage information that it provides.
We'll also cover the process to convert user profile disks
or UPDs to FSLogix,
and add WPD components to your base images.
So let's get started.
First, you'll need an Azure subscription,
and if your organization already has one,
you'll need to make sure that you have the right level
of permissions.
Now, this also extends to service provisioning,
networking, storage and of course,
virtual machine creation, among other services.
Next, we're going to head over to Azure Migrate.
Now the best way to get there
from the Azure portal's homepage,
go down to useful links and Azure Migration Tools.
Now once you're here, you're going to see options
for migrating Windows and Linux servers,
migrating SQL and other databases
or exploring more scenarios,
which is where you'll see VDI as well as web app migration.
Now to get started with VDI, I'm going to go ahead
and click into VDI,
then I'll click on to add tools.
And this is going to walk us through a wizard-based process
to select assessment and migration tools.
So in the first step that you see here,
select assessment tool,
we're going to see Lakeside SysTrack.
Now Lakeside is a Microsoft partner that specializes
in assessing and migrating VDI environments.
Now at SysTrack solutions supports Microsoft RDS,
VMware, Citrix and even physical devices,
to help with a readiness assessment, app usage analysis,
and to make sure that we can discover, prioritize
and migrate dependent apps,
as well as right sizing a virtual machine infrastructure
for Windows Virtual Desktop.
So now I've got it selected, I'm going to go ahead
and click Next to the next step.
So that's where we're going to see our migration tool.
And as I mentioned earlier,
this is going to be Azure Migrate Server Migration,
again, that supports client operating systems.
So it works with VMware, Hyper-V as well
as physical machines and can be used with on-premises
or other clouds.
Now it's going to replicate VMs
and also allowed test migration ultimately,
migrate or cutover your production workloads into Azure.
So I've already got this selected,
so I just have to hit Next and continue.
Here I can see all my selections, and I'll click Add tools.
And now I've got my tools selected,
I'm ready to start assessing my current infrastructure.
This is easily the most important phase
if you're going to be using shared VMs and standard images.
And I want to point out a few unique considerations,
when moving your VDI environment to Azure.
Now here we'll assess quite a few different aspects
across our hosts in our VM host pools,
or for personal VMs that are assigned to individual users.
Now the assessment from Lakeside is going to help you gather
this information, the first thing you need to do is click
into register for Azure Migrate.
That's going to actually log you in
and then create that connection, that linkage,
between Azure Migrate and your Lakeside dashboard.
Then you'll be able to track discovered users
that are ready for migration within Azure Migrate.
Now importantly here, you're going to have
to deploy agents to your virtual machines as packages.
And you can use your standard software distribution tools,
things like Configuration Manager.
And once those agents are installed and configured,
they'll start logging up performance
and inventory data among other things
into the Lakeside portal.
So in Lakeside SysTrack Visualizer,
you'll see once I click from Desktop into Persona,
it's done a lot of work here in terms
of looking at average CPU utilization, memory IOPS,
and it's even segmented the different user types
to deskbound, non-deskbound and shared users.
So we see quite a bit there.
Now if we go into resource consumption
for users we'll be able to see how each user
and how each virtual machine is actually consuming resources
in our inventory.
So all the different critical things there
to make decisions around things
like VM sizing, for example.
Now additionally, beyond all of this,
you can go back into Desktop and check out all the rest
of the aspects of your virtual machines
for example, applications.
So here you get a full inventory of all the applications
that it gets discovered in your environment.
But even more importantly for VDI,
is looking at things like application latency.
So you can look at the considerations around
in-house network resources that you need to decide,
with all of this, what you're going to move,
what maybe to bring with you into Azure,
as well as what you might be able to leave behind
in your current on-premises VDI infrastructure.
So one tip here for internal network paths,
and even connecting your on-prem domain controllers,
you're going to need to establish a virtual network or Vnet
between your internal network
and the VM resources and services
that you're going to be running in Azure.
Additionally, depending on the usage needs
for your in-house hosted apps,
you'll want to consider migrating your app servers,
up into the cloud.
Also, using Azure Migrate;
that will get them closer
to your desktop VMs that are running in Azure.
So let's go back to our assessment.
So here you can also see under resource consumption,
you can see things like CPU percentage, memory percentile,
and also IOPS and networking consumption.
Now, Lakeside also provides a rating
for individual user experience that you can check
pre-and post-migration for benchmarking.
Now, the tool will also log much of that
collected information back into Azure Migrate.
So here I'm going to click on discovered users.
When I click in there, you'll see that we've got information
on user accounts, their devices, total applications used,
the operating system that's used
if it's a shared Windows Server OS, for example,
that will show up as well.
Also their persona, the target VM size,
and even the target location.
Now another tip here for Windows Virtual Desktop,
you're going to need to synchronize your Active Directory
with Azure AD.
Now, if you use Office 365 right now,
chances are you already have done this.
And Azure AD is used to authenticate
into the remote desktop apps as well as the WVD web portal.
But then when you access virtual desktops or apps,
the authentication for those sessions
is performed via your domain controller,
which is usually either another virtual machine
that runs on Azure,
or Azure Active Directory Domain Services in Azure.
Now in most cases,
you won't be bringing your existing standard images
as is completely as they are right now,
from your current VDI environment.
The details from the Lakeside assessment
is going to help you inform how to
compose your desktop images,
including approaches for provisioned applications,
security components and controls,
how they connect to services
and also matching appropriate desktop and app resources
to end users based on their current usage patterns.
Next, you'll need to set up your
Windows Virtual Desktop instance in Azure.
Now here, you'll start by creating a host pool.
So you do that by going through the standard process,
you'll see kind of the familiar fields around the name,
some of the aspects around who's using it,
then if I want to customize the virtual machines,
I can do that here.
I'll give that a number of virtual machines I want to have
within my host pool and I can select either
from an image that I imported into Azure Blob Storage.
Or I can choose to use an image from the gallery,
which I'll do in this case.
From there, I can look at the parameters
and create my host pool.
Now one note here is that WVD is optimized
for FSLogix user profiles
and doesn't support other forms of user profile disks.
But you can convert user profile disks
to FSLogix profiles using PowerShell.
That converts the disks and also places it
into the correct shared location in Azure.
And to do this you need to get
to the FSLogix migration preview module
for Powershell at aka.ms/FSLogixMigrationPreviewModule.
And here you can also see the sample syntax,
for both UDP conversion,
as well as roaming profile conversion.
One note is that you'll need to have the modules loaded
for Hyper-V, ActiveDirectory
and Pester to run these commands.
Now if you're using personal VMs, one dedicated per user
and client operating systems,
you might want to start by looking into moving
to Windows 10 Enterprise multi session.
This option is unique to WVDE
and can give you the same compatibility
and user experience of a dedicated VM, using a client OS.
But the resource utilization benefits
of a shared operating system,
which until now, was only a server option.
Now, that means that depending on your VM specs
and usage, your users might actually benefit
from more powerful compute,
while reducing your overall infrastructure costs.
Now, when you combine this with FSLogix user profiles
and app layering using MSIX App Attach,
shared VMs feel dedicated to your users.
But each time they log in their user profile
and apps will dynamically get assigned instantly
and provide a consistent experience regardless
of which VM they're assigned to
in a host pool.
If your primary use case
is moving the underlying virtual desktop infrastructure
to Azure, using new or standard images,
your work now in Azure Migrate is done.
Now you need to do the rest of the work
in the WVD admin experience.
And if you haven't looked at this since WVD's
initial launch in September 2019,
we've delivered a comprehensive set of controls
in the new WVD Admin Center.
This is where you're going to provision most
of the aspects of the service,
the host pools I showed you earlier,
as well as your user's workspaces and application groups.
Plus any considerations for managing user profiles
by FSLogix or app delivery via MSIX App Attach.
Now if you're looking to move persistent
and dedicated personal VMs into Azure,
then we'll continue using the migration tool
that we selected earlier
with Azure Migrate Server Migration.
Now in this process, just like with migrating servers,
you're going to first set up an appliance VM
in your environment that's going to manage the replication.
Next, you'll target the host that you want
to replicate into Azure Blob Storage.
Then once you're done replicating virtual machines
will continuously replicate into Azure
until you're ready to test and migrate those VMs
into production.
Now, for either migration type
after your virtual machines are running in Azure,
you'll need to install and configure the WVD agent
which you can get from aka.ms/WVDVMAgent.
Let me show you what that looks like.
So here after we run it,
we'll click Next, we'll see our licensing terms.
Now here's where it's going to ask for a registration token.
Now we have to use PowerShell to export that
from our host pool and our tenant running WVD.
Once we do that, that will create a txt file
with your registration token.
You'll Copy that, and then insert that value here
into the agent.
Then I'll click Next.
And that will basically connect that virtual machine running
in Azure to your web environment and host pool.
The agent is packaged as an MSI,
and you can pass in your Edge token as a parameter
when automating the processes shown here,
using an MSI exec commands.
Now the final step is to match those VMs to users
and assign them to the people that are using them prior
to the migration.
You'll see as I do that here, I'm just going to go
into WVD admin portal, click on users,
then we'll search for the users or groups.
In my case, I'll just click on accountants; and here
I'll see the assignments that I've already got prepared
for them in one host pool.
And I can add another host pool, for example here,
with work apps and 0224HP.
That's going to then apply a new host pool maybe
from the VMs that I just imported.
So remember, as with any migration,
it's usually best to start out with just a few hosts
and users, then scale your deployment out
as you master the tools and processes.
So that was an overview of the IT admin steps needed
to assess and migrate your virtual desktop environments
to Windows Virtual Desktop hosted on Azure.
Now, check out aka.ms/WVDplaylist.
For even more information on Windows Virtual Desktop,
and all of your options.
Thanks for watching.
I'll see you next time.
(soft music)