There has been a lot of great information now the last couple of days regarding Windows Virtual Desktop like the blog post from Bas here –> https://www.basvankaam.com/2019/03/19/the-windows-virtual-desktop-what-we-know-so-far-its-more-than-you-think-65-facts-listed/ still there is some questions that also remained unanswered yet as part of what they are building as part of it.
However there is still some information that I wish to highlight about it.
1: The entilement to WVD is based upon what kind of OS license you have or OS subscription.
This means that if you have one of the following licenses you are entitled to WVD for instance if you have Windows E3, E5 and so on you are entitled to WVD. Same goes if you have Windows Server RDS SAL or CAL with SA you are also entitled to WVD.
2: The entitlement to FSLogix works the same way.
If you have the same license you can also get access to FSLogix which is essentially part of the same bundle that you get access to. Which can then be used for on-prem or the Cloud.
3: License usage to Windows 10 Multi-user is not limited to WVD
In essence Windows 10 Multi-user doesn’t need to be WVD only, based upon information that came out earlier you can or should be able to use Windows 10 multi-user as a regular CSP customer in Azure.
4: WVD Does not support Azure AD joined devices
This means that all WVD machines currently require and Active Directory, which in essense requires that you have an Active Directory built in Azure, either using Azure AD Domain Services or regular IaaS. Since WVD Connects to a virtual network to integrate with Active Directory you need to have that up and running first.
5: WVD uses TCP based connections using WebSockets.
Since WVD connects clients trough Azure to a gateway and broker services that Microsoft manages and uses a WebSocket connection to push the RDP traffic trough between the WVD agent, Gateway and the end-user. This means that it will never push traffic using UDP and that will severly limit the usage of GPU based upon that.
Also it seems like there is some form of QoS on the bandwidth usage that each tenant can use between the client and end-user. So that means that audio and video traffic will be pushed trough TCP connections, severly limiting the end-user experience. RDP as a protocol has gotten quite good over the last years and can also push a lot of the content from an audio/video perspetive but not WVD yet atleast.
6: Traffic on the WVD with Multi-user Windows 10 is handled by RDAgentBootLoader Service
When innstalling the WVD Agent you get a new service called the RDAgentBootLoader service which runs and has the connection to the different Microsoft Services. It does also come with an Monitoring agent as part of it which logs events to a specific Event Log Source
You can also view logs under the RemoteDesktopServices–RdpCoreTS Event Log under Application log.
You can also diagnose using the Diagnostic service that Microsoft has built, that requires that you use the WVD Powreshell cmdlet –> https://docs.microsoft.com/nb-no/powershell/windows-virtual-desktop/overview
Using the command Get-RDSdiagnosticsacitivites or
Get-RdsDiagnosticActivities -TenantName <tenantName> -UserName <UserUPN>
7: The Preview runs Management compoents from Azure US
During public preview, desktops and apps can be deployed on virtual machines (VMs) in any Azure region, and the management solution and data for these VMs will reside in the United States (US East 2 region). That means services like the RDweb feature is also running trough the US Region, same goes with the Gateway that handles the incoming connections. This also affects the performance during the preview for non-US based users. Hopefully they will expand the management regions to EMEA as well and ensure that the service us fronted using GSLB to point users to the closest location.
Stay tuned for more.