Azure Virtual Desktop: Introduction and Deployment Options

One fine day while we were quietly sitting in our IT department dungeons, we received a visit from one of our colleagues from the commercial department. Accustomed as we are to what these visits represent, everyone in the department became tense. What follows is an accurate reproduction of what was discussed at that meeting: 
 

 

• "Guys we need you to put out blog posts on a specific topic for marketing." 
• "On a specific topic... Ok, we'll see what we can do." 

 

The first decision to take into account for this deployment is how we want to work at Cloud level. To do this the question we ask ourselves is the following: do we want to virtualize the entire user experience or only specific applications? Let's take a look at the options presented by Azure for the use of virtual desktops:  

 

• Azure Virtual Desktop: selecting this option means taking the entire user experience to Azure. It is useful when you want to establish a work philosophy that allows you to work from anywhere or device and allows you to establish a telework model with which the user need only use your physical device to connect to your virtual desktop. 

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• Remote Apps: we can select this option if we want to virtualize only some specific applications of our line of business for whatever reason: perhaps its use is infrequent or consumes too many resources on workstations we have the ability to run them from Azure thus reducing the specifications required for office equipment.  

With this in mind, we can decide what our approach to deployment will be. Below is a short list of the main components of the deployment.

As a general rule when deploying Azure Virtual Desktop or Remote Apps we will have to consider the following aspects:  

 

• The type of user we will host in the host pool (whether more graphics processing power, CPU or memory is required). 
• How we will treat the user sessions (FSLogix) 
• How many machines we will deploy and in what way (scaling)