Windows Virtual Desktop Announcements at Microsoft Ignite

Microsoft

 

We hope you are all enjoying the Microsoft Ignite conference. Here are some announcements on Windows Virtual Desktop that you will be hearing during the event.

 

Azure Monitor for Windows Virtual Desktop - Provides a centralized view with all the monitoring telemetry and visualizations you need to debug and troubleshoot issues. We have received amazing feedback during the public preview and have made several updates to this capability including: 

  • A designated report page for your Azure Alerts 
  • A prioritized view of Windows Virtual Desktop agent errors and warnings in Host Diagnostics 
  • Consistent coloring and default health thresholds 
  • Export to Excel option across all relevant reports 
  • Accuracy and user experience improvements 

 

Thank you for the support during the public preview. We expect to make Azure Monitor for Windows Virtual Desktop generally available in next few weeks, with additional updates in store. Learn more about Azure Monitor for Windows Virtual Desktop 

 

In case you had missed, here’re some recent announcements we made leading up to Microsoft Ignite.  

 

EU metadata storage now in public preview - We have a public preview of the Europe (EU) geography as a storage option for service metadata in Windows Virtual Desktop. Customers can choose between West or North Europe when they create their service objects. The service objects and metadata for the host pools will be stored in the Azure geography associated with each region. To learn more, read our blog post announcing the public preview 

 

Windows Virtual Desktop Specialty certification - We announced a new Windows Virtual Desktop Specialty Certification for professionals planning, delivering, and managing virtual desktop experiences and remote apps on Azure. The related Exam AZ-140: Configuring and operating Windows Virtual Desktop on Microsoft Azure will be available soon in beta version 

 

Smartcard authentication  You can now use smartcard authentication (available in public preview) with the Windows client from outside the corporate network without requiring line-of-sight to the Domain Controller. Learn more about supported authentication methods 

 

You can keep track of these and other news about Windows Virtual Desktop in our what’s new page 

27 Replies

@Kam VedBrat How are there no updates for Teams VDI?  I've had to stop my WVD deployment because Teams VDI doesn't work for meetings.

 
 
 
Can you elaborate on that. I'm starting a wvd poc in a few weeks
Would be nice if Microsoft gave some indication when WVD will support Azure AD join for those who have AAD only environments - this is a real roadblock for numerous organizations who bought in to the cloud only realm. Or what about SSO for WVD if you don’t use AD-FS? That too would be pretty handy.
Actually there have been some updates to Teams for WVD - check out the link: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-desktop/whats-new
You can use AADDS if you want that full cloud true serverless model.
Try using intune autoenroll with that. True cloud only is needed with intune.
I've not yet done a large implementation of Teams on WVD but understood from the media optimisation that it would work fine, what are the challenges that you face that make it unusable? Thanks :)
Yea Notnhaving having gallery view and only having presenter view is poisoning my deploy right now. Users are revolting against it because this and the sharing features in the cloud are not anywhere near feature parity with non wvd teams. Also why can zoom do 24 users in gallery view in wvd but teams cannot? The link you sent shows nothing about the above concerns. If ms wants wvd adoption they need to support their own product better then competitors in wvd
One thing that has always occured to me as being a bit self-defeating about running these IM and collaboration tools on VDI - invariably for them to function 'properly' for video calling, you need to have the client app installed on your end-point... so why bother running it in the VDI at all when it will work fine locally?

I get that having things in one place is the ideal, but it always seems like ice-skating uphill.
How would you do that?
Isn't ADDS needed for session host domain join?

@Anders Jensen Nah, Azure ADDS works too -- the issue is that essentially, this is just an lite version of an on-prem AD environment.  There's still servers behind the scenes, and there's quite a bit of expected functionality that doesn't work -- things like OU structure, etc.  

 

So again, organizations that have bought into cloud-only infrastructure, essentially have to spin up some kind of on-prem infrastructure, whether it's AD using Azure IaaS servers, or using Azure ADDS.  This really defeats the purpose -- I should be able to use Azure AD only to handle WVD VMs.  Just like any other user device can straight join Azure AD.

The camera will randomly zoom in when you are in a meeting. You are lucky if that happens, as the camera usually freezes when another user joins the meeting. The only way to use the camera again in Teams is to log off windows or restart. 1:1 calls work perfectly.
These did not fix my above issues.
The camera will randomly zoom in when you are in a meeting. You are lucky if that happens, as the camera usually freezes when another user joins the meeting. The only way to use the camera again in Teams is to log off windows or restart. 1:1 calls work perfectly.

@Quentin Gerlach it is extremely easy to Deploy and integrate AADDS for your session hosts and Azure Files enrolment. Additional cost, yes $100/month for the smallest SKU that will work for a several hundred users environment. SSO option with AD-connect was around for a few months now, also really easy to implement, have a look.

True, but you can only have one per tenant and it's single region. Really not fit for Fortune 500 who operate globally with multiple brands
When we deploy WVD, for new cloud only customers, we deploy Azure VMs with ADDS role and AADC installer. For file share / FSLogix profile container we use a storage account, which is also ADDS joined. This works perfectly, but imho it overcomplicates the design as AAD should be sufficient.
Sorry Quentin, I misread your post. Of course AADDS is supported, I thought you meant AAD.
Problem starts arising when you have multiple regions to deploy in as AADDS is single region and you can only have one per tenant. That means that you will have single point for failure even if you have WWD in multiple regions.
Besides that, it just feels odd to build new in the cloud and then have to rely on on-prem technology. Currently we do AD to AAD to AADDS to WWD which doesn't feel right... :S