When I first encountered Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD), formerly Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD), at a Microsoft briefing in 2018 my ears pricked up. Having spent many years enduring the problems and overhead of building, managing and supporting on-premises infrastructure and terminal server farms this was music to my ears. A cloud native virtual desktop with no backplane infrastructure to manage and no licenses to worry about, it seemed too good to be true.
I jumped on the technical preview to do some testing and my initial impressions were very positive. Fast forward to September 2019 and AVD finally went generally available. We had our first customer ready to go and excited about the benefits this technology would bring to their business. They were a typical organisation with aging on premise infrastructure that was proving unreliable, expensive to maintain and a security risk. In the legacy world this customer would have invested in new hardware and started the refresh cycle all over again.
I’m a firm believer that it is not economically viable for most organisations to maintain hardware infrastructure on premise. Cloud makes so much sense in this segment particularly from a total cost of ownership perspective. However the problem is always, how do we access legacy applications running in the cloud. The answer used to be a terminal server, but this had so many drawbacks not least of which were infrastructure complexity, licensing costs, security, and ease of access. Enter Azure Virtual Desktop. Our customer was already on Microsoft 365 and once Microsoft announced that AVD would be made available with this product set the decision was simple.
We quickly migrated their legacy applications to a couple of VMs in the cloud. This was easy as we were already using Azure Site Recovery to protect their on premise VMs in case of a disaster. We then created our Windows 10 “golden image”, installed the applications and created the end user profiles. The users logged onto the Virtual Desktop using their existing Office 365 credentials and accessed their legacy applications as if they were running locally. And that was it. They were up and running. There were no latency issues since the applications are running on a VM that sat right beside the data in the cloud. In order to make the solution even more cost effective we scheduled the VMs to power down outside of office hours, so they were only paying for what they were using.
There are many benefits to this new approach not least of which the customer no longer has any hardware that needs to be maintained on premise. They were happy not to have to make this investment and we were happy with not having the overhead of managing an on-premises server. Site visits and associated costs have dramatically reduced. We have seen other benefits such as:
We are currently trailing a Raspberry Pi device that will act as a dumb terminal to connect their office-based staff directly into AVD instead of having to purchase expensive desktop computers.
Since this initial deployment we have rolled out Azure Virtual Desktop to several more customers. Interestingly many of our enterprise customers who have their main production systems on-premises, are now utilising AVD as part of their DR solution. After COVID19 hit we have noticed that we have 2 types of customers. There are those on AVD and there are those that are constantly ringing us with VPN and remote access issues.
Since the product went GA in 2019 Microsoft have introduced a host of new features to AVD such as integration with Azure Files, Application Streaming, Teams audio redirection and an exciting roadmap that includes direct Azure AD join. It’s always encouraging to see new features coming on stream as it demonstrates Microsoft’ commitment to the product.
And why wouldn’t they be committed to it. It’s the piece of the jigsaw that was missing for a long time and is one of the best products they have announced in years. We are delighted that we got ahead of the curve and our customers are reaping the benefits particularly during the current “work from home” period.
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