What is Azure Virtual Desktop?
Article
03/17/2022
2 minutes to read
25 contributors
Azure Virtual Desktop is a desktop and app virtualization service that runs on the
cloud.
Here's what you can do when you run Azure Virtual Desktop on Azure:
Set up a multi-session Windows 11 or Windows 10 deployment that
delivers a full Windows experience with scalability
Present Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise and optimize it to run in
multi-user virtual scenarios
Provide Windows 7 virtual desktops with free Extended Security Updates
Bring your existing Remote Desktop Services (RDS) and Windows Server
desktops and apps to any computer
Virtualize both desktops and apps
Manage desktops and apps from different Windows and Windows Server
operating systems with a unified management experience
Key capabilities
With Azure Virtual Desktop, you can set up a scalable and flexible environment:
Create a full desktop virtualization environment in your Azure subscription
without running any gateway servers.
Publish host pools as you need to accommodate your diverse workloads.
Bring your own image for production workloads or test from the Azure Gallery.
Reduce costs with pooled, multi-session resources. With the new Windows 11
and Windows 10 Enterprise multi-session capability, exclusive to Azure Virtual
Desktop and Remote Desktop Session Host (RDSH) role on Windows Server,
you can greatly reduce the number of virtual machines and operating system
overhead while still providing the same resources to your users.
Provide individual ownership through personal (persistent) desktops.
Use autoscale to automatically increase or decrease capacity based on time of
day, specific days of the week, or as demand changes, helping to manage cost.
You can deploy and manage virtual desktops:
Use the Azure portal, Azure CLI, PowerShell and REST API to configure the host
pools, create app groups, assign users, and publish resources.
Publish full desktop or individual remote apps from a single host pool, create
individual app groups for different sets of users, or even assign users to
multiple app groups to reduce the number of images.
As you manage your environment, use built-in delegated access to assign roles
and collect diagnostics to understand various configuration or user errors.
Use the new Diagnostics service to troubleshoot errors.
Only manage the image and virtual machines, not the infrastructure. You don't
need to personally manage the Remote Desktop roles like you do with Remote
Desktop Services, just the virtual machines in your Azure subscription.
You can also assign and connect users to your virtual desktops:
Once assigned, users can launch any Azure Virtual Desktop client to connect to
their published Windows desktops and applications. Connect from any device
through either a native application on your device or the Azure Virtual Desktop
HTML5 web client.
Securely establish users through reverse connections to the service, so you
don't need to open any inbound ports.
You can see a typical architectural setup of Azure Virtual Desktop for the enterprise
in our architecture documentation.
