Understanding WVD Usage

[mogulman52]

I'm trying understand usage hours on WVD.  I setup WVD a months ago and just started using it.  Let me explain what I'm doing.  I work part time as IT support for a small legal firm.  He produces a lot of legal financial documents.  I created an Excel addin that uses Azure SQL DB and produces reports that include graphs, pivottable and tables.  It emails PDFs to my boss and clients.  It also emails clients on document progress and key calendar events as .ICS files.  I use Task Scheduler to trigger events.  It consumes about 10 minutes of compute time daily.  I was running it on my desktop during development.  It was not 100% reliable due to power outages, internet outages and unplanned restarts.  WVD proved to be a perfect solution.  After WVD setup I'm on Remote Desktop Client less than an hour a week and use about 10-15 minutes of background processing a day.  How much am I using it ?

Thanks

[#2 · Accepted solution]

Hi @mogulman52 

It sounds like you have 2 options. If you are only using WVD for 1 hour each day then it maybe easier to just either manually power the VMs on and off when you need them, or implement power management. 

Without power management your VM is running 24x7 and costing money. When a VM is powered on it is costing you money, whether you use it or not.  A VM will only not cost you money when it is in a "stopped and deallocated" state.

You can configure this by following the instructions here - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-desktop/set-up-scaling-script

You could for example tell the autoscaling script to only ensure that VMs are available from 1pm - 3pm every day. This would automatically power the VMs on and off, which would save you money. 

Hope that helps! 

[#3]

@Neil McLoughlinThanks for your reply.  I'll check what the cost actually is.  I could probably limit time to 6am to 6pm.  It looks like an involved process to setup and probably maintain.

[#4]

Hi @mogulman52 

Well to be honest once you set it up, you can just leave it running. Yes its a bit of effort to set it up but you could save yourself a lot money!! 

You should also check out https://wvdlogix.net/wvdlogix-autoscaling-tool as Patrick recently released a GUI version which does it all for you!!