Teams on AVD? Is it really this bad?

Copper Contributor
We have many AVD deployments mainly on E Series machines (E16asV4) (AMD) (16/128GB) and Teams on VDI is just embarrassing.

I don't expect the VDI based Teams to be a 1:1 comparison, but the quality and stability is just not consistent.  Whether users are using thin clients or actual laptops, the experience is basically rolling the dice.

 

Lagging, choppy, random black screens.  On the latest build of AVD, Teams, FSLogix with Premium storage (excluding Teams cache, etc, etc)

We have extensive background in VDI in general and have played with every possible policy including Prioritizing H264.   Nothing seems to bring consistency to Teams on VDI.   

Been going through this since the beginning (2019), but it's just insulting that this product would be released in this condition and our clients are just not happy and we take the brunt of this.

The only thing I can try is moving from AMD to Intel proc, as I said we have tried just about everything.  

 

Would appreciate any feedback from others. 

4 Replies
Yes, even Microsoft tried to use WebRTC redirect audio/audio, it is still very bad performance
Whilst I agree, parity with the desktop product is frustrating (pop out chats, background blur (coming)) overall we have a reasonably good teams experience. I look after a 200 user hostpool of a bunch of D8as_v4 (8cpu/32Gb) - limit to 6 users per host as Teams can hit hard, but we have a pretty reliable experience. I presume you've looked at the network stats on your clients, and aren't using downlevel (Win7 for example) clients. Also when using AV Optimisation this can suffer on aging hardware, but really we're just after additional features - performance is good enough for daily calls. I use AVD over my corporate laptop.
Bear in mind that layering AVD on top of a corporate device, often with a VPN client, is asking for trouble. We've had user latency shoot through the roof on corporate devices as VPNs bounce you around to different Azure Front Doors. Its really for users at home on their <5 year old Windows 10 PC (imho)

regards,

Paul.

@Komp_89 Did you get anywhere with this in the end? I am facing similar issues. Do you happen to have a list of the optimisations you have tried so far?

We run dedicated B2m mainly (2 vcpu 8gb ram) and B4m (4 vcpu 16gb ram) VMs running on Windows 11 Pro and Enterprise over mainly Windows 10 local desktops and laptops with some Mac users (uggh). Started on this journey a few months ago. We connect directly to Azure to get to AVD and from there, access to Corp network. We use AVD-optimised Teams with WebRTC redirect media which means the local machine/client needs to have decent or good enough specs to have a good media redirection experience.

We didn't seem to have the issues you mentioned although it has limited features including not showing video of the person speaking when Teams is minimised, no audio/video settings adjustments during a meeting like the standard Teams version would have, and can't right click on a participant's video and select Fit to Frame. However, Microsoft is releasing updates to keep up with the standard version along the way. Hoping they will get there sooner than later!