Azure Virtual Desktop

Once I clicked on that application, I can see the inbound applications.

And it was my Windows Virtual Desktop client and Windows Virtual Desktop.

Given that, I'm assuming this is just where Windows 365 Cloud PCs are hosted, since those are the only two applications.

But it does give you some of those additional details.

And we're not anti-Windows at all.

It should be run in the data center of Windows 365, on AVD, on Citrix, on Omnissa.

But at the end point, you still need to give users choice in the types of workloads that they're using.

So when it comes to Office and G Suite and similar applications, Microsoft created something called a progressive web app, which is part kind of a local install and client, but mostly connecting off to the Office 365 applications.

Hello, and welcome to today's episode of the Demystifying Microsoft podcast.

I'm your host, Nathan Taylor, and I'm excited to have this conversation with Dennis today around AVD Hybrid.

How are you doing today, Dennis?

You know, not too bad.

Yes, one of the smartest people I know, and it's always fun to wrestle through this, man.

It's exciting, so.

Well, let's talk about AVD.

So first of all, I think it'd be fun to start with some history around AVD 'cause it's a product that's been around since the 2018, 2019 timeframe, a little bit before COVID.

I'm a cloud solutions architect.

I'm also Microsoft MVP for Azure Virtual Desktop and Windows 365, so I'm busy with a lot of virtual desktop stuff.

That's my passion.

Ah, and I saw a video of you.

So yeah, it runs pretty well.

And that's also the reason why we wanted to do a day event.

If you look at the website, we focus on things like Entra, Intune, Azure Virtual Desktop, Windows 365, Security Co-Pilot, and that's basically it.

while a lot of other events, they go way, way, way broader, like all the Azure stuff, Foundry stuff.

Yeah.

I think if you modernize with AVD, et cetera, you can use the Windows Hello passkey and routing and stuff.

Yes.

But not everyone has the luxury of like the latest AVD and the latest Windows.

Right.

You have Citrix and all these other systems.

Nice, nice, nice.

And, um, if we, if we look at Workplace Ninja Belgium, uh, you guys have both had sessions on Windows 365, uh, AVD.

Uh, Dev Box is something that I saw.

Um, what, uh, what, what was your session about, Yuri?

Well, uh, what you see lately, uh, is that more and more, let's say, desktop workload is, uh, going to the cloud.

Uh, uh, lately means, uh, already a couple of years.

Well, it started with AVD, uh, Azure Virtual Desktop.

That was actually bringing remote desktop services, which is an on-premises solution, to the cloud.

But you should start to see early signals of like, how are people engaging with this? In data, also semantically.

In the comments, are people giving good feedback, or is actually something here not quite resonating and you've missed the mark? In the data, we're really looking for, like, is this, is this performing really well on CTR? Are people really choosing this episode? Or actually, is the AVD really low? So let's say for, I guess for, I'll give some context for, for viewers at home.

CTR is how many people, the percentage of people that saw and clicked the episode.

AVD is another really key YouTube metric.

It's the average view duration.

How long are they watching for? You could see that you have a great title, great thumbnail, the CTR's 10%, but the AVD's super low.

How interesting.

Okay, so people are clicking for this, but they're not staying, so that tells me that perhaps they've been misled in the promise.

And I do believe that most, like, more of these PaaS services will, will also come in the fut- in the future.

Um, one oth- other area that's also very nice and have been there for quite some time now is th- the possibility to use Azure Virtual Desktop on Azure Local, and f- I have built some of those solutions on Azure Local, and we use a, a lot of the components in Azure, so we actually, we build our images in Azure.

We have the whole orchestration in Azure, but we just deploy the session host to the Azure Local cluster instead of the Azure Cloud.

But everything else is actually the same.

So that's a, I think that's a huge win for us.

I, I know that as, uh, AVD or Azure Virtual Desktop can now be deployed on the Arc-enabled, uh, environments, so we don't have to use Azure Local.

But for quite some time, that was the case.

You could only run AVD on Azure or Azure Local.

Yep

... uh, A- A- A- AVD.

Um, does the, does the traditional idea of, of, of a corporate network still matter?

Uh, yes.

The reason is like, uh, there are some of the applications which are like quite, uh, dependent on the on-premises, and those are legacy applications.

Like, uh, when we do the application migrations, right? Let's say when we move from Windows 10 to 11, and we wanted to move most of our devices to AVD or the cloud PCs, we won't be able-

Mm-hmm

... to do that, uh, at a scale, uh, for like, let's say targeting 95% or 100%.