Azure Virtual Desktop now supports the ability to deploy your session host virtual machines in Azure Extended Zones. This reflects our commitment to providing organizations with a broad selection of Azure locations to run their workloads. The first Azure Extended Zone is now available in Los Angeles, California.
What are Azure Extended Zones?
Azure Extended Zones are small-footprint extensions of Azure placed in metropolitan areas, industry centers, or a specific jurisdiction to serve low-latency and data-residency workloads.
Diagram showing some of the industries and use cases where Azure Extended Zones can provide benefits.
How do you access an Azure Extended Zone?
Access to an Azure Extended Zone must be requested before you can deploy any of the available Azure services. Please refer to Request access to an Azure Extended Zone for more information on how to submit your access request.
Are there differences when deploying a host pool in an Azure Extended Zone compared to a normal Azure region?
Azure Extended Zones do not support the Azure default outbound route. This requires you to enable a method for the virtual machines to have internet access, with a minimum of access to the Azure Virtual Desktop FQDNs and endpoints. You can deploy Azure Load Balancer, Azure Firewall, or a third-party firewall to provide this access.
To ease this process, we have enhanced the Azure Virtual Desktop deployment capability to allow you to either create or select an existing Azure Load Balancer from within the same host pool deployment flow. If you have access to an Azure Extended Zone, the portal experience is dynamically updated to show a new section that will allow you to create a new Azure Load Balancer or select an existing one.
Diagram showing the Azure portal with the option to select or create an Azure Load Balancer.
Due to the smaller size of Azure Extended Zones, not every virtual machine family is available. For more information, refer to Service offerings for Azure Extended Zones. And, for more about how to get started, see Azure Virtual Desktop on Azure Extended Zones.
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