- Coming up we'll take a closer look
at Windows Virtual Desktop now
in public preview to give your users
the only Windows 10 multi-session experience
virtualized in the cloud and available on any device.
Now we're gonna show you how
it delivers the best Office experience
with multi-session virtual scenarios,
and stay tuned for a sneak peek
at the next generation admin experience on the Azure Portal.
(light techno music)
I'm joined once again by Scott Manchester
who leads the the Desktop Virtualization team at Microsoft.
Welcome back and congrats on the public preview.
- Yeah, thanks Jeremy it's a great milestone
that we have reached.
We hope to learn a lot from you
and progress quickly through the preview
and get to general availability of the service.
- Alright, so what's new and exciting
with Windows Virtual Desktop.
- We got a lot of new things to show here Jeremy.
If you're a user we focused
on giving you the full Windows 10
and Office productivity experience.
And regardless of the virtualization deployment type:
whether it's a single or multi-session environment,
whether it's based on client or server,
it's all delivered through Azure.
And if your an IT admin you can now manage all
of this in Azure using one service.
- Right and you're talking about the end-user experience.
How has that then been enhanced?
- Well that's a great place to start.
We've made progress across all our clients,
but let's start with the Windows experience.
So here I am on my Windows 10 device and I'm using the new
Windows Virtual Desktop client application.
- [Jeremy] Right.
- [Scott] Now the cool thing about this application
is it can run all the way from Windows 7
all the way through Windows 10.
Now here you can see all the apps and desktops
that my IT admin has provisioned for me.
And I can launch them right here through this application,
but they've also been fully integrated into the Start menu.
So if I go here and bring up my Start menu,
you can see all of these applications are right here.
Now if want to launch an app, let's say Word,
and here you can see that it's running down
in my taskbar and the only thing that really indicates
that it's a virtualized app is the fact
that it has this little glyph over it.
Now watch this, if I right-click on it,
I can say pin to taskbar,
and now I can actually close that app.
And you can see that it still remains here on my taskbar
and it looks like all my other Windows apps.
- [Jeremy] Mm-hmm.
- [Scott] So I'll go ahead and launch it again.
And you'll see again it pops up quickly.
Now this app looks and feels just like a local app.
So I can snap it.
I can take this thing and run it full screen.
And I can even copy and paste
between other local applications with this.
So it looks and feels like just any other application
on my Windows desktop.
- Now traditionally if you're deploying VDI,
I know the challenge has been
that maybe if you're using Office or Outlook
a lot of those applications require persistent storage.
And really kind of a one VM to per user environment
to work kind of in the way they were designed.
- Yeah, Outlook and other Office applications
traditionally require data persistence
to provide the best experience.
However the most common configuration
for virtualized environments is nonpersistent host pools.
- Right and this is one of those things
where you need to use nonpersistent multi-user sessions
because it's less expensive.
You can get more than one user on a VM,
and it's a lot more efficient than running
it kind of in that one-to-one scenario.
- Yeah you're right, and now with WVD,
we can enable the best of both worlds.
I can now deploy Windows 10 Enterprise Multi-Session
and have that rich Office experience,
and this is enabled by FSLogix technologies.
We recently acquired this technology
and integrated it into Windows Virtual Desktop
so now your Office and other applications
and other data can roam with you.
Let me show you this in action.
- Alright, let's take a look.
- [Scott] So here I've also remoted
into a full Windows 10 Enterprise Multi-User Environment.
- [Jeremy] Mm-hmm.
- [Scott] Now I'm gonna prove this to you Jeremy.
I'm gonna right-click here, go to the Task Manager,
and I'll click on this user tab.
And here you can see there's a number
of users remoting into the same machine at the same time.
- [Jeremy] Yep.
- So we're running Windows 10 Multi-User,
and now I'm gonna go ahead and launch Outlook
just like I would on any other desktop.
And you'll notice here that Outlook
actually loads really fast.
And not only does it load quickly
but it actually will automatically be hydrated
with all of my OST.
- Yeah, and this just as kind of as context here,
normally if you did this without hosted cache
you'd have had to pull all of that down
from Exchange Online, for example in this case
and hydrate out your inbox.
- Yeah, you'd be waiting here for a while
for it to transact and load all your inbox.
And the other cool thing is if I do a quick search here,
you'll note that my inbox is also indexed.
- [Jeremy] Yeah.
- [Scott] So I can quickly do a search across all of my OST
and find files or emails that I'm looking for.
And as you mentioned let me show you how this is configured.
If I go under file and bring up my account settings,
I want to show you that I'm actually running
in Outlook cached mode.
So I'm running just how I would on any other machine.
- Very cool, and the beauty here with FSLogix
is actually we've containerized the user profile data
and we can attach then in real time
to the session that you get brokered to.
Even if you've never seen that VM before.
- Yeah you're right, so normally I might be logging
into a different VM each time.
So I get routed to a different VM in a host pool.
- [Jeremy] Mm-hmm.
- But we'll mount that storage,
to whatever VM you happen to be logged into,
and it looks like it's persistent
and running from the C-drive.
- Right, so that's Outlook.
What about other Office applications?
Do they benefit as well?
- So another limitation with multi-session environments
has been supporting OneDrive.
With FSLogix technology I now have full access
to my OneDrive in nonpersistent multi-session deployments.
- [Jeremy] Mm-hmm.
- Let me show you a demo.
- Let's take a look.
- [Scott] So here I'm back in my
Windows 10 Multi-User desktop.
And you can see in the system tray
that I'm running the OneDrive sync client.
Now if I bring up my OneDrive folder, I want to show you,
you can see which files are actually still in the cloud.
Some of these files are actually synced here locally.
And then here's another file that I've actually pinned
to say make it always available.
- [Jeremy] So it's files on demand.
- [Scott] Files on demand, exactly.
So now if I want to load a file that's still in the cloud.
Let's pick this one here, it's a rather large file.
You'll note that this file can copy very quickly
across to my machine and launch into PowerPoint
and it was really a seamless experience.
Even though that file wasn't actually
originally stored on this machine.
- Okay so there's a few different pieces at play here.
We saw FSLogix in terms of mounting the storage,
and the files on demand working.
And it's attaching to OneDrive in this case.
So why don't you explain what works
behind the scenes here to get this working.
- So here's how this works.
I have a one terabyte of storage
as part of my Office subscription.
And this content is all hosted in OneDrive.
And the OneDrive sync client,
and the Windows 10 Enterprise Multi-Session
both work together to support OneDrive files on demand.
So because of this I can set up
a much smaller user profile disk,
and let OneDrive cache my most recently addressed files
for always available file.
Now when I want to access an on demand file
it immediately hydrates and this uses
the high speed networking infrastructure
across the Microsoft Cloud to ensure files move
as fast as possible become locally available.
And then I'm able to access that file locally.
- This looks really great but what happens
if I want a device that doesn't have,
where I don't have the ability
to install a native WVD client?
- Well we have native client apps for every major platform:
Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android, and even an HTML5 client.
So Jeremy your computer doesn't
have a native client installed.
Why don't you show us what
that experience looks like from a browser.
- Sure, so here I'm logged into a browser.
I've got all of my apps provisioned for me by IT.
Even some desktops here and kind of the same experience
is that I can launch, I'm gonna launch the full desktop
in this case and here you can see that Windows 10 shows up.
One of the cool things that I like
is if I actually press this little button here,
it's now full screen.
It's gonna respect the host device resolution settings
and everything so now I've got a full Windows 10 experience.
And I can go ahead and click on apps,
so now even though I'm in a browser,
I can launch another browser here like edge in this case.
(laughter)
And everything just works as you'd expect.
So we've seen the desktop experience.
But how would this work then on other mobile platforms?
- Everyone's mobile today, and they want to connect
to corporate resources on any device.
And Windows Virtual Desktop is the premier platform
for delivering Windows apps and desktops to these users.
Now while we provide the same great experience
across all major platforms.
Let me show you how this works on Samsung DeX.
So here I have a Samsung Note 9,
attached to this display here through a USB-C cable.
- [Jeremy] Okay.
- And I've also paired it with a Bluetooth keyboard
and a Bluetooth mouse.
But I can actually interoperate
with this experience using the phone itself,
or again my Bluetooth mouse.
So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go back to our main menu
in our Remote Desktop client app here,
and here you can see all those same resources
that my IT admin has provisioned for me.
And I can click over here and see the apps,
and the full desktops.
So what I want to do is actually remote into
that same session that I was logged into on my PC.
So now I'm running that same session I was on my desktop.
I might have traveled halfway across the world,
now I have that same Windows experience
on a different device and all I needed
to carry with me was a small phone.
- And I can see how this would be really beneficial
for people that use maybe different locations
or work from different areas.
Kind of in a mobile workspace scenario.
- Yeah there's a large trend
around mobile office environments.
Leveraging shared spaces and hot desking.
And this can be a great fit for contractors,
law enforcement officers, and the road warriors
that need the occasional touchdown space to be productive.
- Mm-hmm, so that's Android.
What's new for iOS?
- Well if you use an iOS device,
you'll also have a great new experience
with the new version of the Remote Desktop client
available today in TestFlight.
Now this works with the latest iOS devices,
and we've also extended the capability
to enable mouse support
through a partnership with Swiftpoint.
- [Jeremy] Okay so let's put that little mouse to work.
- [Scott] So let me show you here.
So on this iPad, I've got the latest version
of the Remote Desktop client loaded.
- [Jeremy] Okay.
- [Scott] And here you can see
that I have all those same resources
that I saw on my Windows PC and the Android device
available to me here.
So let's go ahead and launch
that same Windows 10 Multi-Session this time from the iPad.
So here we are back at that same desktop,
and now I can interact with this
in the same way I've can in the past using touch.
But now I can also use this mouse.
And between this mouse and the Apple keyboard,
I've got another rich experience here.
So I've got this full Windows Desktop experience
that's mobile I can take it with me where ever I want,
and use whatever device I want
to have the same access to those apps
and desktops that I had available on my Windows PC.
- Very cool, so it's really great
to see how Windows Virtual Desktop breaks down
all the barriers on both the user experience side
across mobile devices and personal devices,
and even in the browser.
Now the team's really been cranking on new stuff.
But what's new on the management side?
- What I'm about to show you is not in the preview.
But I want to give you an early view
of what's coming for the Azure Portal integration
for Windows Virtual Desktop.
- [Jeremy] Alright let's do it.
- So here I've logged into the Azure Portal,
and I'm actually looking at the tenant
that was hosting the demos that we saw earlier.
So I can see all the host pools
that have been created by my IT admin here.
Now each of these host pools could have been configured
for a different group of users.
Perhaps my engineering department has a set
of host pools hosting applications for them.
There might be host pool group for my accounting department.
Let's drill into one of these here,
and kind of take a look at some of the settings
that we can apply here.
So note one of the first things I see
as I drill into this host pool
is this option to download a registration key.
Now this is a cool feature that allows me
to actually take an existing set of VMs
that might be running in Azure in a resource group,
and add those to this host pool.
So that's one method of extending
the host pool capabilities adding new machines.
But I can also drill into machines here,
and I can actually through this UI,
if I had the right privileges, I could add additional VMs
and have them provisioned into Azure
and added to this host pool in an automated way.
Now you can see here I can also see the number
of users I have connected.
I can see if the machines are on or off,
and if they're in drain mode.
I can also drill into app groups
and in this particular host pool I'm hosting the desktops.
In fact this is the one that we were connecting to earlier.
Having the full desktop experience with Windows 10.
But also through this UX I can set up groups of apps.
So I can install a collection of apps on the VM,
and set up a collection, specific collection for one user
or group of users and another set
for a different set of users.
So this makes it a lot easier for an IT admin
not to have a giant collection of VMs
that they need to manage.
I can customize the apps that I'm hosting
for different users.
So again this will provide a very rich experience
for IT admins to work within the Azure Portal
to manage and deploy Windows Virtual Desktop.
- Very cool, so right there within the Azure Portal
you can manage your WVD along with
all the different Azure services
that you might me using day-to-day
like Azure Active Directory and others.
- Yeah, and of course you can hook into
your current automation solutions
by using our templates and our REST APIs.
We have a rich set of tools we've provided
for IT admins to deploy and manage Windows Virtual Desktop.
- Very cool, so how else can people go and learn more
about Windows Virtual Desktop?
- Well this is an exciting day for us.
We've announced the public preview,
and I encourage everybody to go sign-up
and start kicking the tires on this now.
- Great stuff, thanks for joining us today Scott.
And of course keeping watching Microsoft Mechanics
for the latest tech updates.
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and we'll see you next time.
(light techno music)