Azure Virtual Desktop - thoughts about how realistic it is

[Millgate_Victoria]

Hello Edugeek

 

I was interested to know the opinions you have on Microsoft Azure Virtual Desktop.

 

Does anyone use it? if not why not? anything for me to consider? I appreciate your thoughts and time

 

many thanks Victoria

[Aprice]

I think it's a good product, but I'd have thought its usage in schools is probably quite low. I can't really see any reason why any of our schools would use it, unless it was free or really low cost (maybe computing / ICT)

[steve]

Not looked at it in our uni for a little while, but over COVID we had one of the biggest implementations in Europe. Probably not any more as its been scaled back significantly as people have returned to the office / gone hybrid. Our use now is primarily for hybrid worker access to core systems where we don't want data leaving the organisation, for access to line of business applications from personal devices, and for student access to teaching and research related software they can't run themselves (e.g. Apple device owners).

 

Microsoft are constantly improving the service and the supporting bits around it. We have found the main issues are around the quality of the applications you install on it - Windows multiuser isn't always happy with poorly written memory hogging software. And the cycle of updating the underpinning image(s) can be a pain - but that could probably be minimised using some good IaC automation.

 

If you are considering retaining user configuration, you'll need fslogix to store profiles separately from the host pools.

 

Other things to consider are what other services you have that you are expecting users to want to access? Are they all in Azure, do you need a link back to your on-prem systems? What's your wider end user compute strategy, where does this fit with VPNs, BYOD, etc. How will you configure and manage the underlying VMs - we still use AD and GPOs as Intune has its challenges around consistency between hosts.

 

Cost wise its much more effective at large scale than DaaS like Windows 365.

[brianhig]

Microsoft Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) is pretty cool for setting up virtual desktops in the cloud. A lot of businesses are digging it because you can scale up your desktops and apps without needing a bunch of new hardware on-site. It's great for remote work too, letting your team access everything securely from wherever they are.

 

If you're thinking about AVD, think about how it'll mesh with your current IT setup and what kind of performance your team needs. Cost-wise, it can save money in the long run, but keeping an eye on usage is key to not blowing the budget

 

For me it works so you can try it

[PotNoodleTech]

It's an interesting one and having used thin clients across the school a long long time ago I can see benefits but I can not imagine any cloud offering would be very good value for money as cloud prices seem pretty bonkers at the moment.

 

What are you guys and gals paying per member of staff roughly?

[steve]

It's an interesting one and having used thin clients across the school a long long time ago I can see benefits but I can not imagine any cloud offering would be very good value for money as cloud prices seem pretty bonkers at the moment.

 

What are you guys and gals paying per member of staff roughly?

 

Can you clarify? What are paying our staff on average or what are we paying for AVD per member of staff?

 

If its staff salaries - we have a lot of IT staff at the uni, 350-400. Salaries range from apprentice minimum wage to CIO £100K (guessing). Finger in the air, about £40K average?

 

AVD per person - well we have 10K staff, 40K students. We provision (expanding pool) typically up to 400 users concurrently. Worked out at about £167 per concurrent user per year. But AVD is only a part of the end user compute offering for us. We spend much more on other things like VPN, application virtualization (Apps Anywhere), hardware, etc, etc. Our Azure bill alone is probably more than double most primary schools yearly budgets.

 

But the uni has a turnover of almost a billion a year.

Edited July 1, 2024 by steve

[PotNoodleTech]

Yeh the staff cost of the virtual desktop. Cheers. I guess having a billion pound turnover helps the IT coffers somewhat

 

Cost seems high but as it's concurrent users not total users that's not too bad actually!