Archive of posts with category 'Azure Virtual Desktop'

Debugging Azure Virtual Desktop errors/issues/network latency and bandwidth with an interactive Workbook

Correctly configured, Azure Virtual Desktop sends diagnostic data to a log analytics workspace (Azure Monitor). There are several logs containing data about the events in the backend:

Entra Dynamic Device Groups for Azure Virtual Desktop - Host Pools, Resource Groups and Subscriptions

I was searching for an option to group all AVD hosts (Entra and hybrid joined) of a pool in a dynamic device group. Unfortunately, I didn’t find a perfect solution...

OneDrive Clean-Up for Azure Virtual Desktop

Running OneDrive with Azure Virtual Desktop is a common scenario and enables users to work in a modern way with Teams and SharePoint. If FSLogix is used, there is a...

AVD Need Assistance - NAT shape is Undetermined when probing turn:20.202.248.2:3478?Udp TURN relay health check failed ...

Current issues: AVD agent reports an issue and brings the hosts into “Need Assistance”

CountrySwitch - First Logon Experience and language selector and an app starter for remote apps on network paths for AVD

First Logon Experience and language selector and an app starter for remote apps on network paths

Improve AVD User Experience: Warm-Up to decreas User login time

If you are running Azure Virtual Desktop with FSLogix, the first login to a host takes longer than the following logins. I also wrote about this effect (I call is...

Windows Update API issue - Exception from HRESULT: 0x8002802B (TYPE_E_ELEMENTNOTFOUND)

Windows gives you access to work with Windows Update on an API level. This is often used to find, download, and install new updates programmatically. That makes special sense in...

Common issues in Azure Virtual Desktop (VMs-Session Hosts relations)

VM- Session Host relation In Azure Virtual Desktop, session hosts in host pools are providing remote applications or desktops to users. A session host is an object in a host...

How to image a Confidential Golden Master VM and deploy confidential Session Hosts for Azure Virtual Desktop

Azure confidential VMs offer strong security and confidentiality for customers by isolating data. That can also make sene for Azure Virtual Desktop. One of my favorite deployment methods is the...

How to image a Golden Master VM based on a plan to a compute gallery definition

The Azure Marketplace offers many preconfigured VMs, which are preconfigured images from a third-party vendor used to deploy a VM. One popular offering is “CIS Hardened Image Level 1 on...

Imaging, Rollout and Manage Azure Virtual Desktop on Azure Stack HCI with Hydra

Manage Azure Virtual Desktop on Azure Stack HCI with Hydra

Microsoft Azure and hibernated Virtual Machines and Azure Virtual Desktop Hibernation

Microsoft introduced a new feature for Virtual Machines: Hibernation (link to MS post). That is awesome and allows totally new scenarios, not even for Azure Virtual Desktop. But used with...

Install the New Teams Client on Azure Virtual Desktop (preview) - AVD

Microsoft made the New Teams client available for VDIs (preview)

How to get the Client IP Address in Azure Virtual Desktop

While migrating Virtual Desktop Environments to AVD, I got another challenge from the past: Sometimes, companies use the client IP address to identify the user’s location to map a specific...

Updating a Golden Master VM from Windows 10 multi-user to Windows 11 multi-user

The Golden-Master approach is a common way to deploy applications and desktops as session hosts in Azure Virtual Desktop. The approach is very simple, and the rollout of new session...

Updating or cloning a Azure VM with standard security to trusted launch with secure boot and vTPM

Note: If your source VM is based on the VM generation V1, follow this post to convert your VM: Creating a Windows Azure VM Generation V2 from a V2 VM....

Creating a Windows Azure VM Generation V2 from a V1 VM

Microsoft has provided different VM sizes over the last years and also introduced the VM Generation V2 at the end of 2019. V2 VMs are different from V1 VMs and...

Onboard AVD pooled session hosts to Defender automatically with a script

Onboarding session hosts to Defender is very important for security reasons. Microsoft has documented the way to onboard these devices in different scenarios here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/security/defender-endpoint/configure-endpoints-vdi

Session hosts are not available in Azure Virtual Desktop, but VMs are running.

During June/July, I got several emails that session hosts were not available in AVD, but the VMs were in a running state. Rebooting the host sometimes helps, and the host...

Deploying and updating standard applications with Microsoft Package Manager / Winget automatically

Around 2.5 years ago, I introduced a feature in WVDAdmin to install applications from a list of thousands of VM and hosts. That was based on the Microsoft Package Manager...

Using FSLogix file shares with Azure AD cloud identities in Azure Virtual Desktop - cloud-only, AVD

With AAD-Kerberos, you can use AAD-only joined session hosts with FSLogix. This is a great approach to working more cloud-native. With AAD-Kerberos, the session hosts don’t need to have network...

Automatically remove a computer object from AD while removing a session host in AVD

With my tools WVDAdmin and Hydra for Azure Virtual Desktop, you can easily manage Azure Virtual Desktop. It also includes the deletion of session hosts and VMs with a single...

Azure AD only joined hosts in Azure Virtual Desktop: Join and re-join hosts

Azure AD-only joined are getting more common in Azure Virtual Desktop. There are some challenges running AVD hosts as AAD-only. One challenge is that you can roll out a new...

Working interactively with user sessions in Azure Virtual Desktop

Handling user sessions in AVD could be more intuitive in the Azure Portal. Luckily, some tools (like WVDAdmin, Hydra, and others) are available to make it easier. I made a...

Sysprep and deploy Windows 11 22H2 in Azure with a custom image and a workaround

A common way to build virtual machines based on an image in Azure (e.g., as Session hosts for Azure Virtual Desktop) can be done by the “Golden Image” approach.

The challenge of having the correct language in the Edge browser with Azure Virtual Desktop in West Europe

If you run Azure Virtual Desktop in a data center in another country, you maybe know that the browsers are showing some websites in the data center location language. For...

Azure Virtual Desktop: Logging session host state to Log Analytics to show state and sessions over time

Update October 2022: Check out the following Workbook to use diagnostic logging to get and visualize the data

Azure Virtual Desktop Session Hosts with Azure Disk Encryption

Hydra for Azure Virtual Desktop and WVDAdmin are supporting ADE for AVD Session Hosts.

Azure Trusted Launch and Custom Images - even for AVD

Trusted launch for Azure virtual machines is currently in public preview (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/trusted-launch). The trusted launch has some benefits, like:

WVDAdmin - Azure Windows Virtual Desktop Administration for CSP and Consulting Partners

Azure Windows Virtual Desktop Administration for CSP and Consulting Partners

Get alerted if Azure Virtual Desktop fails - AVD Monitoring and alerting with Loganalytics / Azure Monitor

Monitoring Azure Virtual Desktop is important to get insights into the performance and resource usage and alert if something generally goes wrong. Especially, getting alerted if something goes wrong is...

Azure Virtual Desktop: Reserved Instances or Scaling

A while ago, I wrote a blog post about saving money by smartly switching the disk types of Azure VMs. But what’s about using reserved instances instead of switching VMs...

How to use MSIX AppAttach without having computer accounts synced for Azure Virtual Desktop (AD synced and Azure Files)

Using MSIX AppAttach in Azure Virtual Desktop is great. To stage the MSIX AppAttach packages, the session host needs permission to read the package. If the package is placed on...

Directly connect session hosts with a 3rd party management environment

While working with Azure Virtual Desktop, I still miss some features that seem unavailable through Microsoft or maybe a 3rd party vendor. One of the features is that an admin/helpdesk...

AVD issue: SessionHost unhealthy SxsStack listener is not ready - Code -2147467259

A few days ago, I got an email from a customer concerning that a lot of Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) session hosts showing an error message from the internal health...

Why switching disk types can save a bunch of money running Azure Virtual Desktop

In March 2021, I introduced a new feature for #WVDAdmin to change the disk type of a VM to automatically change the disk type before starting a VM and after...

Hydra is publicly available and listed on the Azure Marketplace

I’m pleased that my project Hydra is now listed in the Azure Marketplace as a deployable solution into the customers’ subscription - which is essential to make sure that no...

WVDAdmin supports AAD only deployments for AVD / WVD - AAD: Azure AD

One of the announcements of the Microsoft Inspire 2021 was the option to join session hosts #AAD only. I’m happy to have the implementation also ready in #WVDAdmin.

Hydra: Automize, scale and manage Windows Virtual Desktop / Azure Virtual Desktop like a pro - including multi-tenancy

Project Hydra for Azure Virtual Desktop Six months ago, I started a new project to provide a solution to manage Azure Virtual Desktop / Windows Virtual Desktop in an automated...

Power-On-Connect Feature in Azure Windows Virtual Desktop and custom role for Power On Connect preview

Power-On-Connect Feature in Windows Virtual Desktop Power-on-connect is in preview for assigned session hosts and pooled session hosts (multi-user host pool). With the new feature, users are triggering the start...

Shrink and resize an Azure VM disk or session host disk and create smaller images from a Golden Master

A Windows 10 image from the marketplace has a size of 128 Gbyte. So, all of your VM based on that image are deployed with a 128 Gbyte disk -...

Azure Windows Virtual Desktop Fileupload with the HTML5 client

Microsoft is extending the HTML5 web client. Today (May 2021), there is a new function to allow uploading files directly into the session. The user can select the feature while...

Changing the disk type automatically while starting or deallocating a session host / VM for WVD

The costs of running virtual machines in Azure summarize the costs of their components like VM type (compute), storage, network, and some other parts. While the spendings for the compute...

Sysprep error: RunPlatformActions:Sysprep data was marked corrupt; cannot proceed

I’m working in the WVD/AVD area and often create golden images to deploy session hosts for WVD/AVD - mainly based on Windows 10 Enterprise multi-session. To do that, I create...

Push Azure Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD) Session Host state to Log Analytics to create alerts if hosts become unavailable or failed

Microsoft offers an easy way to monitor a WVD/AVD environment’s basic metrics directly integrated into the Azure portal. I mostly extend the monitoring using sepago’s Azure Monitor for WVD (https://www.sepago.de/en/azure-monitor-en/),...

WVDAdmin videos on YouTube

WVDAdmin is my free community solution to manage and work with WVD/AVD / Windows Virtual Desktop. Mainly, building images and rolling out session hosts are key-value-adds. But you can also...

Push Azure AD User properties into Azure Monitor Log Analytics to build Azure Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD) performance data based on these

Azure Monitor / Log Analytics is my first choice to store log and usage data. Even for Azure Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD/AVD), it is crucial to have an eye on...

Least privileges with custom roles for Azure Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD)

Administration, deployment, user support of Azure Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD) needs permission in Azure. But these permissions are depending on the task a group of users/administrators have to do. For...

Shadow a WVD/AVD user with least privileges

WVD allows local administrators to shadow user sessions. You can do this easily with WVDAdmin or using the command-line like this:

What's wrong with Windows 10 and UWP and Sysprep?

I’m working in the WVD/AVD area and often create golden images to deploy session hosts for WVD/AVD - mainly based on Windows 10 Enterprise multi-session. To do that, I create...

Azure Windows Virtual Desktop - Monitoring the Spring Backend - WVD

The long await update from WVD/AVD is public. It comes with a full ARM integration and is natively useable in the Azure Portal. Some things changed from the Fall to...

Migrate Azure Windows Virtual Desktop Host Pools from Fall to Spring Release - WVD

The long await update from WVD/AVD is public. It comes with a full ARM integration and is natively useable in the Azure Portal. The change from Fall to Spring (the...

Azure Windows Virtual Desktop - Spring Release / Spring Update with WVDAdmin

Azure Windows Virtual Desktop - Spring Release / Spring Update goes public today. I’m tremendously happy about that while this is the next big step that we have eagerly awaited....

Using Azure AD groups to assign users to Azure Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD)

Today (early April), it’s not possible to join groups to application groups or desktop in Windows Virtual Desktop. Users have to be assigned directly with their user principal name (UPN)....

WVDAdmin - A native administration Gui for Azure Windows Virtual Desktop - Preview Version

Feel free to use it and download the 64-bit Windows application “WVD Admin Preview” from here: WVDAdmin-Preview.msi

Azure Windows Virtual Desktop and Language Packs - Detecting Host Pool and Tenant Name issue

Language packs on Windows sometimes cause some issues or strange behaviors to some applications. One problem I can reproduce is the impact of the RDAgent from Microsoft - the agent...

Azure Windows Virtual Desktop - Azure Starter for WVD

This month I started to build my fourth tool around Microsoft Windows Virtual Desktop. This new one, called “Azure Starter for WVD” is a self-service portal for users using WVD....

Using WVDAdmin for Azure Windows Virtual Desktop in 2-AAD-Environment (Microsoft Demo Case)

Using Azure Starter for Azure Windows Virtual Desktop in 2-AAD-Environment (Microsoft Demo Case)

Automatic MSIX App Attach script for Windows Virtual Desktop

Automatic MSIX App Attach script for WVD

Announcing the community version of "Project MySmartScale"

Windows Virtual Desktop is released and gateways around the world are available - even in Europe which cause in a low latency - perfect.