Welcome to the AVD Automation Cocktail. In this cocktail series I will show different AVD deployment strategies and languages. In this cocktail, the Fresh Minty Breeze, I will show you how to deploy an AVD environment automated with Bicep and Azure CLI.
Welcome to a fresh new series about deploying Azure Virtual Desktop environments automated called the “AVD Automation Cocktail”. In this series I will serve several cocktails and will take you along on the AVD automated deployment journey with different types of automation languages. Every type has its own pros and cons, deployment strategy, parameter structure and commands. In the series all of these items will pass and hopefully it will give you a good overview about the possibilities.
It is very common to use a golden image in WVD environments. Some are using Azure images, others are using a Shared Image Gallery. A great advantage of using preconfigured images is that you just have to create a new session host from that image and you’re all set.
The change process for an image version is very simple, you will start a virtual machine from the version and you will make the changes. But what if you need to change the OS disk size of the golden image. In this article I will explain how to change a WVD disk size when using a golden image based on the existing environment automated.
During my travel the past year in the world of WVD I noticed I’m using the common Az.DesktopVirtualization PowerShell module very often, but there are some limits. In basics they do their job but if you like more intelligence or add more resource types you will need to combine PowerShell commands to get useful information. That’s the point where I started writing a WVD PowerShell module and now it is time to share my functions as a fresh new module called Az.Wvd.
An Azure Virtual Desktop environment has two types of host pools, a pooled and a personal type. The main difference between them is the user assignment. In this article I will show how to deal with personal assigned session hosts and how to delete the assigned user and will save work.
Costs are a topic of an Azure conversation very often. As we all know you pay for usage, if it is storage, CPU or bandwidth usage, (almost) every resource has its price. For Windows Virtual Desktop it means you have to pay for CPU usage, for example. It is important then to keep this usage as low as possible. Now there is an option to keep these usage as low as possible with WVD Start VM on Connect.
As mentioned in earlier posts Azure DevOps is a really nice way to deploy Azure resources automated. During my travel through Azure DevOps for managing Windows Virtual Desktop resources I moved from classic pipelines and releases to the new YAML pipelines. Using YAML has a lot of advantages in relation to classic. But there are some new challenges coming, approval or manual interventions for example. In this article I will explain how to use approvals and checks with dynamic recipients in DevOps environments within a YAML configuration.
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. In post I will explain how to create a DevOps Service Connection the automated way.
Security became important more and more. It is recommend, now the days arrived where the most people work from home and IT is moving to the public cloud, to use a good firewall with less complexity as possible. In case of WVD within the current situation an IT environment can be complex. In this article I will explain how configure an Azure Firewall for WVD automated with premium options, which came in public preview at 16 February 2021. At the end I will show how to deploy an Azure Firewall specially for a WVD environment with all the needed steps automated.
A lot of people in the Microsoft community are using a fancy gadget called LaMetric Time. It is a smart clock which can show time, receiving notifications from a lot of different environments and more. In this blog I will show how to use LaMetric Time to monitor a WVD environment.