AVD Application and Profile Strategy: Where User Experience Is Won or Lost
A good AVD environment isn’t just a collection of session hosts. It’s an end-user compute platform. That means applications, profiles, storage, policy, performance, and user experience all need to be designed together. Why Application and Profile Strategy Matters Applications and profiles sit right in the middle of the user experience. They affect: ● Logon times…
Using Endpoint Privilege Management with Azure Virtual Desktop: Secure Elevation Without Local Admin Rights
Azure Virtual Desktop is commonly used to provide secure access to corporate applications, development environments, cloud platforms, support tools, and administrative workspaces. However, one challenge I've see is this: How do we let users perform the tasks they need without giving them permanent local administrator rights? Granting local admin access inside AVD session hosts can…
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…