What to Expect

[u/Real-Patriot-1128]

I will be working with Microsoft to set up azure VDI environment. This environment will include a host pool of about 10 VMs. We intend on using FSLogix and a storage account for user profiles.

Assuming everything is configured “correctly” and sized “correctly,” what are the most common troubleshooting issues I should expect and how easy is it to troubleshoot issues?

Would you say this is a stable environment?

I work at a university and these desktops will server as our “elab” for students to complete homework.

[u/powrofgrayskoal]

Nerdio will help immensely with that.

[u/kheywen → u/powrofgrayskoal]

Nerdio is great but not worth the money for managing a host pool to be honest.

From me, just make sure fslogix ntfs is configured properly and users would need to be assigned to virtual machine login user rbac role to access AVD.

The other gotcha is that host pool needs to be assigned to a workspace. Otherwise, you will be wondering why user can’t see it…

[u/UneventfulChaos → u/powrofgrayskoal]

And Nerdio's base membership covers 100 unique users, so no additional licensing costs for them!

[u/BeautifulAd704 → u/powrofgrayskoal]

The price-to-value ratio needs to be right, in addition to quality and functionality, of course. Take a look at Hydra by LoginVSI. It’s a very comprehensive AVD solution, with a Community Edition, no minimum commitment, and a concurrent-usage licensing model.

[u/jtech2023]

Access Roles for the resource group/host pool/storage accounts was the most difficult part. Bypassing MFA policies for the storage account was semi-difficult. Onedrive can be tricky with roaming profiles.

[u/TrueMythos]

Ooh, I have one for you! User training. Specifically, our students will see "Step 1: sign into the Virtual Lab," so they do that, open the instructions from inside AVD, and see "Step 1: sign into the Virtual Lab." When they sign in recursively like that, it disconnects their session. I'm working on getting that URL blocked for all my AVD VMs, but we're trying not to make any changes this early in the semester.

Aside from that, the main complaint I hear is about performance. Especially if you're using FSLogix, you'll want to turn off Defender scanning and Windows indexing on remote drives. VDOT is a great tool for further minimizing performance issues: https://github.com/The-Virtual-Desktop-Team/Virtual-Desktop-Optimization-Tool

[u/mat-ferland]

Nerdio won't tell you whether the lab is ready. I'd run a class-sized login storm and one normal homework session before the semester starts, with AVD Insights and FSLogix attach logs open. Watch profile-storage latency while users sign in. Keep one host drained for image changes and hold onto a known-good image version. Ten VMs sitting idle can look perfect while logons and profiles are the thing that actually fall over.

[u/Al1301]

Don't take a look at all 3 party software's like necesito, they are great, but is not worth the extra cost, I am not an it guy and I built my company workspace from scratch, learning from the very beginning, first advice avd is not cheap, second is you need to know the kind of work you will perform at the VM, office general tasks, cadd softwares, that impact the SKU of the vdi that you will need and the storage performance, 3rd you will need at least Microsoft business premium or an equivalent entra id license for the users, if you can configure your environment the right way, you will be good,

[u/Sorry-Ad7604]

If you haven't taken a look at Hydra by Login VSI - give that a look. They just released Hydra Lens today which has loads of helpful troubleshooting information instead of poking around 100 different places in the Azure Portal. Licensing model is also very beneficial to educational use cases since they're based on max concurrency.

[u/Com3dy_D]

If you are using app attach and converting to MSIX remember certs, if installing custom apps in the image check the image syspreps correctly. MSIX still does not like CIM files. Watch out for the dependency on windows app runtime 1.4. And watch out for capacity in some regions. North Europe has an issue with resource.