Identity and Authentication for AVD
Identity is now an architecture decision, not just an AD decision Historically, many virtual desktop designs started with a simple assumption: “We need domain-joined session hosts because that’s how desktops have always worked.” That’s no longer always true. AVD now supports a much broader set of identity patterns, including Entra joined session hosts and cloud-only…
Designing the AVD Architecture: Laying the blueprints for a successful deployment
A good AVD architecture is designed by asking: Who are the users? What do they need to access? Where is the data? How sensitive is the workload? How should users authenticate? What level of performance is expected? What happens if something fails? Who will manage and operate the platform after go-live? The planning phase gives…
AVD Discovery and Requirements: The Foundation of a Good AVD Design
AVD projects shouldn’t start with VM sizing, host pool creation, or application publishing. They should start with discovery. This phase is closely linked to the planning phase and you will use the planning decisions to help you start looking at the areas that need discovery and how to document them. Before any design decisions are…
Resiliency by Design: Why It’s Non Negotiable for Azure Infrastructure
Building Azure workloads with resiliency in mind is essential, not just a nice to have. While moving to the cloud does not eliminate the risk of failure, it does change how and where failures occur, with components being distributed, updated regularly, and reliant on various platform services. It’s crucial that designs anticipate faults as an…
AVD Planning - Why it needs to be properly considered
AVD is often described as a way to deliver desktops and applications from Azure. Technically, that’s true. But treating AVD as simply “deploying some session hosts and publish a few apps” is where many projects start to go wrong. AVD is not just a collection of virtual machines. It’s a full end-user compute platform that…
Azure Disaster Recovery: Why Replicating VMs to Another Region Is Not a DR Plan
When organisations migrate workloads to Azure, disaster recovery is often discussed as part of the technical migration plan. However, one of the biggest mistakes businesses can make is assuming that simply replicating virtual machines to another Azure region means they now have a complete disaster recovery capability. Spoiler: It doesn't Replication is only one part…