Introducing resiliency improvements with Microsoft Hosted Network

Note: Multi-Region Selection is now Generally Available and rolling out to all customers over the coming days.

Resilience improvements with Microsoft Hosted Network

At Microsoft, we understand that customers need a desktop service that is reliable and resilient — in other words, a service that simply works. Continuing our efforts to deliver customers a robust and productive Cloud PC experience, today we are announcing several new features that enhance reliability and resiliency even further.

Introducing Microsoft Hosted Network (MHN) enhancements

As the number of Azure regions and the number of regions that Windows 365 supports has continued to grow, we saw an opportunity to re-organize region grouping in a way that simplifies region selection and maximizes platform availability when issues occur. Additionally, customers have requested a streamlined way to achieve their data sovereignty requirements when deploying Cloud PCs.

To meet this requirement, we are introducing a new region group location tier that will sit between the current geography and region locations. We are also re-organizing region grouping to provide better availability of the underlying Azure capacity that your Cloud PCs require.

Introducing the new Region Group location tier

We are now introducing a new Region Group tier that provides improved data sovereignty along with improved resiliency. You now have three options for locations that can be selected within a provisioning policy:

The Geography tier remains unchanged, except for the number and region membership of each which is discussed later. It now contains the new region group tiers, which will include multiple regions. When creating a new provisioning policy all region groups within that geography will be selected by default, as well as all regions within the region groups. Our recommendation is to keep all region groups selected as it maximizes regions available and increases overall workload resiliency.

The Region Group tier is new. This tier will group Azure regions into groupings for data sovereignty requirements, while also providing multiple regions for resiliency, across which the resulting Cloud PCs are distributed. A region group typically maps to a single country or a specific geographical boundary (E.g. US East, US West etc.) Choosing this tier establishes the data sovereignty for all Cloud PCs deployed via a MHN provisioning policy where a region grouping has been selected. As new regions are enabled for Windows 365, these will be added into the appropriate region group, providing future resiliency improvements.

The Region tier remains unchanged and still allows you to select a specific region if that is your requirement. However, selecting a specific region limits your benefits of the grouping of regions, i.e. the automatic distribution of your Cloud PC estate across multiple Azure regions, which may increase the impact of an Azure region outage.

We are removing the MHN-Automatic option from the region selection part of the provisioning policy user interface and making this same behavior an automatic and intrinsic part of the service when selecting a geography or region group.

We recommend using the Geography tier whenever possible for maximum resiliency and flexibility. If you have country-specific data sovereignty requirements, choose a region group instead. Region groups still support cross-region deployments, though with fewer regions than a geography. Even if a group currently has only one region, please select it as future additions will automatically provide multi-region benefits.

New location selection for Microsoft-hosted network and network type within a provisioning policy, with an example showing three-tier provisioning selections.

Re-organizing the region grouping to provide better availability of underlying Azure capacity

In addition to the new three-tiered location selection, and to maximize the effectiveness of these improvements, we are reducing the number of geographies and increasing the number of regions within each of these geographies, which in turn provides more selection flexibility, reginal resiliency, and latency optimization.

The new location selection matrix is listed below:

New Azure region organization available within a provisioning policy, showing the reduced number of geographies, the new “region group” mid-tier, and more regions available within the geographies.

Grouping an increased number of regions into a smaller number of geographies and introducing the new middle region group tier provides more flexibility for the Windows 365 service. As new regions come online, they will be added into the relevant region group and geography where appropriate.

New service capabilities to enhance resilience and flexibility

Besides Microsoft Hosted Network (MHN) enhancements, we are introducing two new service capabilities for newly created provisioning policies that will apply to Cloud PCs deployed to either the geography or region group tiers without requiring manual intervention.

• Intelligent Cross region distribution

  To maximize Cloud PC resiliency, Windows 365 now distributes deployments across all healthy regions within a geography or region group when selected. This is applied to all new Cloud PCs within a provisioning policy, minimizing the impact of any single region issue. If your estate of 100 Cloud PCs has been distributed across ten regions and a single region has an outage, then only ten percent of your estate will be affected, as opposed to 100%, which could happen if they were all deployed to the region experiencing the outage. All regions within a geography or region group will be within a similar latency boundary.

  You can check regional location in two easy ways:
  1. Within the All Cloud PCs blade: there will be a new Cloud PC Region column (hidden by default) in the All Cloud PCs view. This displays the current deployment region of each Cloud PC. You can enable this column to surface the region information in the Intune portal.
  2. Via the Microsoft Graph API: The ListCloudPCs API includes a deviceRegionName property in its response, which indicates the provisioning region for each Cloud PC.

• Snapshot distribution

  When using cross region disaster recovery with MHN and multi-region selection, recovery snapshots are distributed across multiple regions instead of being stored in one region. So, if the disaster recovery region faces issues during recovery, only Cloud PCs with snapshots in that region are affected. Remaining Cloud PCs can still recover from their respective regions.

  These new features are only available via the MHN network type when selecting either a geography, a region group, or a group of individual regions. They will not be made available in the Azure Network Connection (ANC) network type. Likewise, region grouping improvements are only applicable when using MHN, so we encourage customers to use the MHN network type as much as possible.

Click here for further detailed instructions: Enhance Microsoft Hosted Network (MHN) Cloud PC Resiliency with Multi-Region Selection

A layered approach to business continuity

With today’s announcement, Windows 365 now offers a more complete and flexible resiliency strategy, one that meets customers where they are and scales with their needs. Whether you're looking for built-in protection from localized disruptions or enterprise-grade continuity across regions, Windows 365 provides a completely customizable layered approach to workload resiliency that adapts to your business. 

Level 1: Point-in-time restore, included within the service.
Level 2: Enhanced MHN functionality, new and included within the MHN service.
Level 3: Premium disaster recovery: cross region disaster recovery and disaster recovery plus, which are both paid add-ons.
Level 4: Windows 365 Reserve, a new separate licensed offering for Windows 365 that can enhance physical device resiliency.

The enhancements we are announcing today will provide important improvements for the on-going management of your total physical and Cloud PC estate, all taken care of by Microsoft so that you don’t have to. By selecting the geography or region group options, Windows 365 will balance your Cloud PC estate across multiple regions within a geography, reducing the impact that a regional issue may have.

The additional resiliency enhancements enabled within the platform demonstrate our commitment to providing more reliable service for our customers. We encourage you to take full advantage of these features in Windows 365 — just tell Microsoft which geography you want your Cloud PCs in and we will manage the rest for you.

Continue the conversation. Find best practices. Bookmark the Windows Tech Community, then follow us @MSWindowsITPro on X and on LinkedIn. Looking for support? Visit Windows on Microsoft Q&A.