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patrick-h's avatar
patrick-h
Brass Contributor
Sep 10, 2020

Best way to scale across data centers for WVD?

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I built a test environment in US West.  I'd like to create WVD in Central US and East US 2.  I need to copy my VM, virtual networks, etc to do this from what I understand.  I also want my users to connect to the region that is closest to them when they sign into WVD.  I can't find any WVD specific documentation on how to do this.  It seems this link would solve the technical part, but not sure these would automatically be added to my host pool.  Any help or pointing to correct documentation would be appreciated.

  • CMurphyUSA's avatar
    CMurphyUSA
    Brass Contributor

    Hey patrick-h 

     

    Hope this helps some, just adding our experience with WVD.

     

    I am not aware of a way to dynamically route a session to the region a user is in. The nature of WVD has you create pools within specific regions and then you assign end users to those specific pools (they can have multiple pools available). When a user logs into MSFT Remote Desktop they will select from whatever host pool they have assigned. If they travel I imagine they could have multiple host pools they could use, but this would be a totally different session with likely a new profile (whether local person or an FSlogix profile unique to that region). Maybe a centralized FSlogix storage server or Azure netapp storage would allow you to have multiple regional pools with each targeting the centralized storage location where their FSlogix profile lives.

     

    What we have done is create centralized regions and assign users to the most appropriate region using the experience estimator - https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/virtual-desktop/assessment/. Most of these users do not travel, even before COVID, so we have not had to solve for them working from different global regions.

     

    As far as managing VMs, we publish to the shared image gallery and have the images replicated to all of our regions so they can be used. This way we have one base image for the pool that we can update and apply to the appropriate pools. Using the image we of course can quickly add additional VMs to the pool.

     

    I imagine you could migrate VMs between regions but the process would be very tedious. Is there a reason you need to migrate vs just create new in the additional region?

     

    You can manually register a VM to a specific pool via this doc - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-desktop/create-host-pools-powershell#prepare-the-virtual-machines-for-windows-virtual-desktop-agent-installations 

     

    Let me know if I can answer anything further from our experience.

    • patrick-h's avatar
      patrick-h
      Brass Contributor

      CMurphyUSA This is extremely helpful.  Thank you!  I have all my systems in the MDM and Azure AD world, so this is a new concept to wrap my head around.

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