An Azure DevOps environment consists of projects. Before create anything in DevOps like a board, repositories or pipelines you first need a project. In this second part of the series Prepare Azure DevOps for Windows Virtual Desktop we are diving into that DevOps part, a project. At the end of this post you will be able to create an Azure DevOps project full automatically.
Using Azure DevOps is a really nice way to deploy resources in Azure, so also for Windows Virtual Desktop. Before you are able to deploy resources into Azure with pipelines you will need to setup a project and a service connection first. While configuring a service connection you will be asked for some specific tenant details.
In this short series I will explain every step you need for setting up a service connection, fully automated of course ;).
In this quick blogpost I will explain a way how to backup and restore Azure resources with PowerShell, in JSON format, to an Azure Storage Account which is “deployment ready”.
Working remotely has a lot of advantages like less travel time, more focus to work (when the house is not full of kids :)), which contributes to working efficiently. But there are some concerns about security, and rightly so I think. Especially when you are used to ‘see’ what happens on the screen in real life which help at least you think you are in control of your data.
Monitoring user environments will help you getting sights what is going on and will help you solving problems. A Windows Virtual Desktop environment isn’t an exception. It is recommended setting up setup a monitoring environment.
Since Windows Virtual Desktop is generally available a lot of improvements has been done. Think about ARM template deployment, MSIX app attach through the Azure portal and performance improvements in the WVD client and latency improvements at the most of the regions.
Since 16 November 2020 a really nice improvement has been added to the list, Windows Virtual Desktop RDP Short path. In this blogpost I will show you how to configure this feature with some automation tasks.
By default the Azure Key Vault has softdelete enabled with a 90 day retention. This option will protect Key Vault items when deleted by accident. When deleted you are able to restore that item through the portal or PowerShell.
But what if someone has deleted the Key Vault itself with all the items and softdeleted items included. There is no option to restore a Key Vault. In this article I will describe a way how to backup and restore a Key Vault when deleted.
When using the Windows Virtual Desktop for a longer time and created images several times you will noticed you are not able to remove old images directly when a new version has been deployed. Or in case of a MSP when you need to manage more then one image after some time you will lose sight on images and versions. In that case an image overview would be nice to have.
The current situation, we have created new disks, snapshots, virtual machines, networks, images and session hosts. All the resources has been added to the existing WVD hostpool. Now it is time to cleanup the old resources, to keep everything nice and clean. In this part we will take care of removing components related to the old image version.
At October 14, 2020 Mircosoft announced the public preview of ARM templates for adding secrets to Azure Key Vault. In this article I will explain a way how to use these templates.