Thanks for joining this course on Azure Virtual Desktops, Host Pools, and Session Hosts. You're going to learn just about everything there is about Host Pools and Session Hosts so that you can pass the Azure Virtual Desktop exam and up your AVD skills. My name is Dean Cefola and I've been in the IT industry for over 20 years. Today, I'm an Azure Principal Engineer at Microsoft and I've been working with Azure Virtual Desktop since before the beginning. I hope you'll find this course entertaining and educational, so please rate this course when you're done and let me know how I did.

Who should attend this course? Anybody that's planning on taking the Azure Virtual Desktop Specialty exam and anyone who's interested in learning more on how to properly deploy an AVD environment. Speaking of this course, we'll cover everything you need to deploy and configure your Host Pools and Session Hosts. We'll set up auto-scaling for Azure Virtual Desktop. We'll talk through the AVD limits as well as the high availability options. We'll go through the AVD Session Hosts join options, as well as take a quick dive into AVD automation, so that you can have a well-rounded view of AVD and how you can build and improve your environment. 

To get the most out of this course, you should have an administrator-level understanding of Azure Virtual Machines, Azure's high availability solutions, Windows Management join options, and then ARM templates, Azure CLI, and PowerShell for automation. Feedback is how we can all continue to improve, so if you have any feedback, positive or negative, you can let me know by rating this course at the end, as well as contacting us directly at support@cloudacademy.com. One last thing before we get started, everything I'll be showing in this course is up to date at the time of filming, however, the cloud does change over time. So, if you find the material here becomes out of date, please let us know at support@cloudacademy.com, so we can keep things updated. With all that out of the way, let's get started.