AVD - Users to Host Ratio

[ACThomas]

Hi Everyone,

Happy New Year to you all!

We're currently in the process of looking to optimise our AVD environment, I just wanted to know what other ratios everyone uses in terms of how many users per session host and VM Size.

Currently at my company we run D8s_v3 hosts allowing 6 user sessions at a time (reduced from 8) as we find that with all our LOB apps on the hosts we tend to take a performance hit with more users.

If anyone has methods for better optimising, please let me know as this is now becoming a big focus for us.

Many Thanks

[#2]

Hi @ACThomas 

I am going to give you the consultants answer of, it depends!! It really is dependant upon your workloads. Personally I start at around a 2:1 Ratio unless the workload is very light. 

The best advise I can give you is to perform your own POC and analyse the CPU, Memory and IOPS usage of each session to determine how the hosts are performing. 

BTW you should look at the D8S_V5 hosts, they cost the same and you will get much better CPU performance. 

A few customers I have worked with have also seen better performnace from the E-Series VMs. 

The other alternative is to use a solution like Nerdio which will auto-scale the hosts based on the actual CPU and memory usage of the hosts (BTW I work for Nerdio). 

Hope that helps! 

[#3]

Hi @ACThomas,
As Neil already said, it depends per situation and you will have to test this.
Check this link to see the Microsoft guidelines.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/remote/remote-desktop-services/virtual-machine-recs