Azure AppServices - AVD

Azure AppServices - AVD <=> "Real" Servers

Azure Virtual Desktop Pricing

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 )

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