Azure AppServices - AVD <=> "Real" Servers
Region:
Depending on the region, the price differs by 20-30%!
Type:
- Pooled => each time a random VM per person
- Personal => always the same VM per person
Session:
- Multi-Session => several sessions on one VM
- Single-Session => one session per VM only (about 5-8x more expensive!)
Workload Type:
- Light
- Medium (Medium to Heavy is factor 2!)
- Heavy
- Power
- Compare Plans - Premium or Standard ...
- Power assumes 1 users per vCPU
- Heavy assumes 2 users per vCPU
- Medium assumes 4 users per vCPU
- Light assumes 6 users per vCPU.
Concurrency:
- Peak Concurrency => Max Users during peak
- Off peak Concurrency => Max Users during Non-Peak
External Users:
- Not applical??? we do not know ...
Savings Options:
- Pay as you go (0%) => Keep in mind, that often (when you really know, how the people are using the systems) Pay-as-you-go is the cheaptest! (you can see it more down in the example)
=> At least for testing, Pay-as-you-go is no problem at all and the solution and not the issue ;-) - Savings Plan (1Y: 20% / 3Y: 45%)
- Reserved Instances (1Y: 41% / 3Y: 62%)
Example Pricing:
- Region: East US 2 ... seems to be 20% cheaper than Germany West Central or North Europe - but, still, we do like EU ;-)
- Type: Pooled
- Session: Multi-Session
- Workload-Type: Heavy
- 250 Users with 220h/month
- 90% Peak Concurrency
- 5% Off peak Concurrency
- No External Users (here, we have to check more in detail for our "externals"!)
- VM Type: D4s v5 - 4 vCPUs, 16GB RAM 0,192 EUR/h
- VMs
- 2 x off peak (510h)
- 35 peak (220)
- ... 1 month is calculated by 730h!
- Pricing - Computing Resources
- "Normal" Pay as you go ...
- Pay as you go: 1674$/month (usage hours ARE relevant)
- ... as of here, the usage hours are NOT relevant!
- ... not fully clear, what this means in opposite to "Reserved Instance"
- Savings plan 1 year: 3947$/month
- Savings plan 3 years: 2692$/month
- Reservation of Servers:
- Reserved Instance 1 year: 2893$/month
- Reserved Instance 3 years: 1863$/month
- Pricing VM-Disks
- Premium SSD
- 627$/month
- Perhaps use Standard SSD? Or even Standard HDD instead?
- Pricing Outbound Data
- 0,05$/GB
- ... we have to test this, what we typically need in a VDI environment ... the complete "changing screen" will be sent out all the time ... e.g. Pictures, Teams, backgrounds, voice
- sss
Ideas for Test Cases:
- Tests with 1 VM (and 6-8 Users) should be charged with 70$/month only for pay-as-you-go => we should be able just create it "for fun & test" and try to setup one individual images for SAPGUI, Office, Teams, Cynet - the rest should not be that urgent ...
- Does Cisco VPN work several times within one VM?
- Measure the traffic & CPU with and without Teams then ...
- Teams with Video & Background: How does the CPU utilization behave? Is this strongly different to using Teams locally? (Heavy => 2 users per vCPU ... is this sufficient?)
- Move a few colleagues to AVD
- Up to 6 users, the calculator uses 1 Instance => we will all end up in one instance and can test "concurrency" in a good way!
- Cynet: How does this behave on the VM? (high CPU demand?)
- As we will need "Domain Join" - do we need fixed VPN as well? Or would Cisco AnyConnect be sufficient for the beginning? => this is needed for "real tests" - initial technical tests above could perhaps be done without Domain Join
- What is the security penalty, when Teams runs locally on the PC?
Licensing:
- Windows Hybrid Vorteil: If you do use Win10/11 Pro, you get 16% discount on Windows 365 Business-Plan
- Features Microsoft 365 Versions
- Windows 10/11Pro & Office License: Microsoft 365 E3, E5, A3, A5, F3, Business Premium
User Defined Images for AVD:
- https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-desktop/prerequisites?tabs=portal
- Custom image templates in Azure Virtual Desktop
- Store and share images in an Azure Compute Gallery
- Create a managed image of a generalized VM in Azure
- Tutorial: Deploy a sample Azure Virtual Desktop infrastructure with a Windows 11 desktop
- (Do NOT use "Host pool type" = "Personal" - otherwise, we do need 1 VM per User!)
- Add session hosts to a host pool (most likely required for pooled sessions)
- How can we use "individual images"?
( Azure, AWS, cloud, hosting, rdp, citrix, wts avd, avi, azure virtual desktop )
#
