Announcing General Availability of Scheduled Agent Updates on Azure Virtual Desktop

[Seneca_Friend]

This week at Microsoft Inspire we announced that Scheduled Agent Updates on Azure Virtual Desktop is now Generally Available!

This feature gives IT admins control over when the Azure Virtual Desktop agent, side-by-side stack, and Geneva Monitoring agent get updated. With this feature you can schedule updates to these components to take place outside of peak business hours so that business critical work and end user productivity is uninterrupted.

To enable this feature in the Azure Portal, simply select the Scheduled Agent Updates tab for your host pool, check the box to enable Scheduled Agent Updates, enter your desired maintenance window and time zone setting, and select Apply. 

You can also enable Scheduled Agent Updates using REST API. Support for enabling this feature using PowerShell will come in the following months.  

For more information about the feature, please read the documentation here. 

[#2]

Will this also be available in Azure Government?

[#3]

Is the agent self-updating removed moving forward? This has been a huge pain for older versions of the agent as well as SxS when updates occurs but then it hangs and breaks the session host. Otherwise this control is highly welcomed.

[#4 · Accepted solution]

This is already available in Azure Government, it just can't be configured from the portal yet! We have a portal deployment happening this week that will make the option visible in the portal in Azure Government.

[#5]

No. The agent still updates itself, it is just a matter of when. With this feature, you have control over when the agent updates itself, the stack, or the Geneva Monitoring agent. So you'd want to schedule the updates to be when there is not peak usage so that if the update causes hang time it is not disruptive. If this feature is not enabled, the agent will update itself, the stack, or the Geneva Monitoring agent whenever an update becomes available and if the update fails, there will be workload disruption.

[#6]

Thanks for the reply! It's started to appear in our tenant and a few of our clients this week. I'm excited to test it out.