Azure RemoteApp

So during TechEd 2014 a couple of weeks ago, Microsoft announced Azure RemoteApp which for my part was the most exiting thing announced as TechEd. The idea behind it is to be able to publish “regular Windows applications” using Microsoft Azure directly to end-users using RDP.

Now with the late release of RDP clients for Android, iOS this allows customers to access their applications in Microsoft Azure using any devices. (Note that the RDP client’s were recently udpated for Android and iOS so take a look for an update)

Now there aren’t any pricing info published related to the serivce since it is currently in beta. But some info is released for

1: customers do not need to pay for bandwidth (going in and out)

2: customers do not need to pay additional licenses for instance RDS cal just to the applications they need published)

3: MIcrosoft Office 2013 will most likely be a part of it

4: Windows Server 2012 R2 is the only supported by Azure RemoteApp meaning that your applications that you want published needs to work on 2012 R2

5: If customers want to add their own applications they need to setup a VPN session in order

6: Each user has 50GB of storage of the remoteapp

Now we can also upload our own template image. There are some requirements here that needs to be in place.

• The template image must be created using Windows Server 2012 R2 with Remote Desktop Session Host and the Desktop Experience feature installed.
• Create a VHD template file. VHDX files aren’t supported.
• Format the VHD as NTFS.
• Don’t include an unattended xml config file in the sysprep image.
• Don’t use VM mode to create a sysprep generalized image.

Now a here is what a RemoteApp service looks like, users will be able to access the service (during the preview) on https://www.remoteapp.windowsazure.com/ after I log in with my user I can start the following Office apps (which are included in the service)

Now the RemoteApp client is running RDP underneath

But RemoteApp is not leveraging UDP but just RD gateway to tunnel the connections to a backend VM

But this is indeed going to be a interesting feature! just needs to be a bit polished and maybe leverage UDP as well and hopefully publishing a pricing calculator for RemoteApp