Have you been wondering what AVD is or already familiar with it and wondering why you might want to run it on Azure Stack HCI? In this post we’ll review what AVD is at a high-level and highlight the potential benefits of running it on Azure Stack HCI.
What is AVD?
Azure Virtual Desktop is a cloud Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) solution designed to meet the challenges of distributed workforces. Up until this year, AVD was only available in Azure where session hosts and user desktops would run on compute in the cloud.
Why not just run it in the Cloud?
AVD on Azure Stack HCI brings VDI capabilities to your on-premises Datacenter, which can have some significant benefits, e.g.:
- Data Sovereignty & Security – if you don’t want your user desktops in the Cloud and have a requirement to run them only on your local secure infrastructure, then AVD on Azure Stack HCI is an excellent the option
- Performance – running session hosts locally, for example in the the same Datacenter as high performance database driven applications, could significantly increase performance for users by leveraging lower latency connectivity.
- Having User Data is located only in your Datacenter can enable better security and performance and AVD on Azure Stack HCI is ideal for this scenario
What’s different to running AVD on premise vs the Cloud?
The main difference, for the AVD service itself, is that the Session Hosts (the compute that runs the user Desktops and Applications, and that users log into) are deployed to your local on-premise infrastructure as opposed to being deployed in the Cloud.
The AVD Control Plane services (Web Access, Gateway, Broker, API, etc.) all still run in Azure, as well as the Host Pools, Application Groups and Workspaces, and hence there is still a dependency on Azure for the AVD service. The key point is that user Desktops and Applications are NOT running in the cloud and can be managed and secured locally, and can provide better performance.
But if there is still a dependency on Azure then what happens if Azure is down?
User desktops will continue to run on your local infrastructure fine, it just might be that new users won’t be able to connect as the broker and gateway services are not available. Just like with running AVD just in Azure, you can design highly available scenarios using different clusters / Host pools in different regions that users can access if needed.
How much does all this cost?
The cost for AVD is $0.01 per vCPU, per hour for the session host infrastructure.
This does not include the user access rights costs, which are included if you have an eligible Windows, Microsoft 365, or Microsoft Remote Desktop Services (RDS) Client Access License (CAL).
Please find more details on the official MS documentation:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-desktop/azure-stack-hci-overview