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Azure Virtual Desktop Blog
3 MIN READ

Curated resiliency recommendations for Azure Virtual Desktop

TomHickling's avatar
TomHickling
Icon for Microsoft rankMicrosoft
Apr 29, 2024

The Azure Proactive Resiliency Library (APRL) is a collection of best practices, recommendations, and scripts that help you improve the resiliency of your Azure Virtual Desktop environment. Incorporating the contributions of multiple subject matter experts around the globe, including Microsoft FastTrack and senior cloud solution architects, the library offers proven guidance based on thousands of hours helping organizations deploy Azure Virtual Desktop in complex environments.

IT professionals face many challenges, such as ensuring the availability, scalability, and performance of virtual machines, networks, and storage during deployment. We know that you need to guarantee your Azure Virtual Desktop environment can cope with high demand, unforeseen failures, and disaster recovery situations. You also need to track and improve Azure Virtual Desktop resource utilization to prevent overspending without negatively affecting the user experience.

We want you to have the best Azure Virtual Desktop experience possible. That's why we have put together this collection of resources. Our goal is to help you overcome (or avoid) common challenges and boost your Azure Virtual Desktop resiliency. With the APRL, you get a collection of:

  • Best practices and guidelines for creating, operating, and managing your Azure Virtual Desktop environment.
  • Scripts and tools that help you implement the best practices and follow the recommendations.
  • Dashboards and reports that help you monitor and enhance your Azure Virtual Desktop resiliency metrics and trends.

You also benefit from recommendations on Azure resources utilized by Azure Virtual Desktop, improving the reliability of the Well- Architected Framework, and configuring, monitoring, and managing workloads.

What are the benefits of using the Azure Proactive Resiliency Library?

By utilizing the APRL, you can:

  • Ensure that your Azure Virtual Desktop environment is available and reliable by following the best practices for fault tolerance, redundancy, backup, and recovery.
  • Make your Azure Virtual Desktop environment more scalable and performant by following the best practices for load balancing, autoscaling, and optimization.
  • Benefit from best practices for encryption, authentication, and auditing, to help ensure that your Azure Virtual Desktop environment is better secure and compliant.
  • Find guidance on resource management and billing, and feedback to help optimize your environment for efficiency.

How do I use the Azure Proactive Resiliency Library?

The APRL is designed to be easy to use and integrate with your existing Azure Virtual Desktop environment. You can use APRL in three simple steps:

  1. Download and install the APRL tooling.
  2. Run the APRL assessment tool to scan your Azure Virtual Desktop environment and generate a report with your current resiliency score and recommendations.
  3. Apply the recommendations by using the APRL scripts and tools, or by following the guidelines and best practices.

You can also use the APRL dashboards and reports to track and visualize your Azure Virtual Desktop resiliency metrics and trends over time. You can customize the dashboards and reports to suit your needs and preferences.

Get started with the Azure Proactive Resiliency Library today

The APRL is a must-have tool for any IT professional looking to boost Azure Virtual Desktop resiliency and achieve the best possible outcomes for their business and users. By using the library, you can improve Azure Virtual Desktop availability, scalability, performance, security, compliance, cost efficiency, and user satisfaction. APRL can also save you time and effort by automating and simplifying the implementation of the best practices and recommendations.

We would love to hear from you and help you optimize your Azure Virtual Desktop resilience so please leave us a comment below. Ready to get started with APRL? Visit the APRL website to learn more.

Special thanks to the team for driving the creation of this set of tools: Swathi Bhat, Prasad Gandham, Tom Hickling, Claus Emrich ,Yonah Shafner, Moises Gomez Cortez, Jesse Coyne, Marc Wolfson, Jonathan Core, and Dany Contreras.

Note: This is a free tool you can make use of in your environment; however, Microsoft does not provide support for this tool.

Updated Apr 29, 2024
Version 2.0
  • Hi shz , Tehais ,

     

    Thank you for trying out the scripts. Based on the error, it seems like the data analyzer is reading the action plan file, but it is empty. Would be good to know if the collector was run first. The collector is run followed by the data analyzer and then the reports are generated. Additionally, would be great to know if it was validated by running on PowerShell 7.

  • shz's avatar
    shz
    Copper Contributor

    Hi Swathi_Bhat,

     

    Thanks for the suggestion. I managed to successfully run the 3 scripts after making the necessary adjustments.

  • G_Jongeneel's avatar
    G_Jongeneel
    Brass Contributor

    Hi all, 

    This seems like a very useful initiative. Many thanks!

    I just did a test with this tool. Is it true that currently only 4 AVD related tests are executed? Seems a bit of a limited scope for the moment, but I expect this to grow in time...

  • Hi G_Jongeneel, Thank you for your question. The AVD tests are reflective of the high impact resiliency recommendations. There are 15 significant foundational queries alongside these, representative of the Azure resources for Azure Virtual Desktop-https://azure.github.io/Azure-Proactive-Resiliency-Library-v2/azure-specialized-workloads/avd/#dependent-azure-resource-recommendations. Leveraging these is essential and recommended for a comprehensive coverage. 

  • Tehais's avatar
    Tehais
    Copper Contributor

    Hi TomHickling ,

     

    Thanks for sharing the library. I encountered the below when i ran the first script "1_wara_collector.ps1". Has anyone encounter this and how did u resolve it?

     

     

  • shz's avatar
    shz
    Copper Contributor

    Hi TomHickling,

     

    Thank you for sharing this library with us. However, I encountered this issue (see picture below) when I tried to run the second script "2_wara_data_analyzer.ps1". Has anyone encountered this problem and has a way to troubleshoot it?