Azure Virtual Desktops (AVD) have been around us for more than five years now and are one of the industry-leading cloud-based workspace solutions designed to meet the challenges of remote and hybrid work. It enables a secure, remote desktop experience anywhere, providing employees with the best virtualized experience. Azure Virtual Desktop has built-in security to protect user data and complies with the organization’s policies. Also, finance can keep a tab on cloud expenditures as it provides the flexibility of consumption-based pricing, where you only pay for what you use.
From past few years, some enterprises have faced challenges moving to the cloud, especially when the cloud isn’t the best option for every workload. As per the Gartner press release, regulatory requirements and user data protection are the pressing needs for 2024; hence, organizations still want to keep their desktop virtualization for applications in an on-premises environment.
Microsoft has introduced Azure Stack HCI powered by hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) that hosts Windows Virtual Desktops and remote streaming applications. It can also host other operating systems’ virtual machines and storage. It is a hybrid product that connects an organization’s on-premises system to Azure for cloud-based services and management with monitoring.
How Azure Stack HCI benefits organizations:
The organization can quickly deploy Windows 10 Multi-Session desktops and applications on Azure Stack HCI in its data center. The Azure Stack HCI extends the same capabilities of the Microsoft Cloud to your data centers. Below is a brief on how organizations can reap the benefits of moving their workloads from legacy infrastructure to Azure Virtual Desktop on-premises.
Performance improvements: Azure Virtual Desktops services are not available in every loop and corner of the globe; if end-users have poor connectivity with Azure public cloud, in such cases, hyper-converged infrastructure will help you to deploy end-users workloads nearest to their working locations. That, in turn, significantly impacts the user experience and improves overall productivity.
Data residency: Data localization is a compliance control, not a security control. Data locality is increasingly seen as necessary. With the help of Azure Stack HCI, organizations can run their desktops and applications locally and keep the user data in their data center. The Azure Stack HCI meets the data locality requirements if an organization has data compliance requirements.
Cost: One of the key advantages of deploying multi-session desktops is to provide a desktop experience to the end-user with limited resources and cost. Azure Virtual Desktops running on hyper-converged infrastructure reduce Azure fees, and customers can only pay for each active virtual CPU for AVD session hosts running on Azure Stack HCI. The hybrid service fee is $0.01 per core per hour of consumption.
Security: Azure Stack HCI virtual desktops’ security and management capabilities come with native Azure integration, viz users have to go through multi-factor authentication with conditional access. From the administrator’s perspective, consistent infrastructure management through Azure Arc gives more infrastructure visibility. Administrators can use the same tools for Azure workloads, like Azure policy for consistent configurations, Microsoft Defender for Cloud for improved multi-cloud security, and update manager to ensure VMs remain updated and patched regularly.
How to avail the benefits of Azure Stack HCI for Virtual Desktops
Many organizations are looking to modernize their virtual desktop infrastructure, but it become a challenging task for the IT team due to data sovereignty and network bottleneck concerns. But, with the new Azure Stack HCI, the organization can run a hybrid solution in its data centers. The hybrid solution integrated via Azure Arc management allows you to select Azure Cloud workloads on-premises. The combined solution provides exclusive AVD capabilities like Windows 10 and 11 multi-session operating systems. One of the pre-requisite steps is to have your local Azure Stack HCI 23H2 cluster running and connected to Azure. The remaining activities are similar to virtual desktop provisioning through the Azure portal, like creating a host pool, creating application groups, assigning user groups, and more.
The AVD administrator can also assign the GPU to provisioned desktops and enable the RDP short-path features to take the maximum benefit of the virtual desktop on Azure Stack HCI. The Azure Stack HCI is priced on a per physical core basis on your on-premises server. If the organization has active software assurance, exchange your core licenses for active Azure Hybrid benefits that waive Azure Stack HCI host service fee and Windows Server subscription.
Home 