The course is part of this learning path
An important aspect of any Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) environment is ensuring you are able to manage the environment and apps in an efficient manner. This includes managing printers and policies and being able to troubleshoot issues quickly. This in turn gives a much smoother experience to end-users. AVD allows integration with both on-premises and cloud-native services, which allows you to:
- Deploy group policies and cloud-managed policies to manage user settings
- Deploy printers via Azure
- Configure environment properties
- Troubleshoot issues
Ensuring settings within the environment are configured correctly is an important factor in giving the end-user a good experience when they are using Azure Virtual Desktop. This course will help you to configure end-user experience settings and allow you to streamline your Azure Virtual Desktop experience.
Learning Objectives
- Configure Universal Print
- Configure user settings through Group Policies and Endpoint Manager policies
- Configure persistent and non-persistent desktop environments
- Configure Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) properties on a host pool
- Configure session timeout properties
- Troubleshoot user profile issues
- Troubleshoot Azure Virtual Desktop clients
Intended Audience
This course is intended for people who:
- Want to become an Azure Virtual Desktop Specialist
- Are preparing to take the AZ-140 exam
Prerequisites
If you wish to get the most out of this course, you should have a good understanding of Azure administration, but this is not essential.
Welcome to this module on configuring session timeout properties. We will cover the following topics in this module:
- We will explain what session timeout properties are
- We will finish off with a demo walkthrough of configuring session timeout properties for Azure Virtual Desktop
Let’s start off by looking at exactly what session timeout properties are. The session timeout feature allows you to log off user sessions that have been inactive for a specified amount of time. It is configured via the local group policy on a session host, so it would be recommended to implement this during the golden image creation. This way it is deployed to all session hosts.
The session timeout properties configuration includes setting time limits for, disconnected sessions, active but idle remote desktop services sessions, active remote desktop services sessions, and finally, you can configure the ability to end sessions when time limits are reached. We will set all these properties in the demo which is next.
Now we understand what session timeout properties are, let’s complete a walkthrough demo of configuring them via the local group policy on a session host. Here we are in our virtual machine which we are going to use for our session host golden image. We need to open the local group policy editor. Once it is opened, we navigate to ‘Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Remote Desktop Services > Remote Desktop Session Host > Session Time Limits. Here we have all the session time-out policies we discussed earlier in this module.
Let’s first edit ‘Set time limit for disconnected sessions’, enable it, and set this to 30 minutes. Next, let’s edit the ‘Set time limit for active but idle Remote Desktop services sessions’ but set this to a little sooner at 10 minutes. Next, let's edit ‘Set time limit for active Remote Desktop Services sessions’, enable it, but leave it set to never. We are now going to enable the policy called ‘End session when time limits are reached’, in the event we set time limits within our AVD environment. The final policy we want to configure is the ‘Set time limit for logoff of RemoteApp sessions’ and after enabling this we will set it to 30 minutes. This completes the configuring session timeout demo.
Shabaz Darr is a Senior Infrastructure Specialist at Netcompany based in the UK. He has 15 years plus experience working in the IT industry, 7 of those he has spent working with Microsoft Cloud Technologies in general, with a focus on MEM and IaaS. Shabaz is a Microsoft MVP in Enterprise Mobility with certifications in Azure Administration and Azure Virtual Desktop. During his time working with Microsoft Cloud, Shabaz has helped multiple public and private sector clients in the UK with designing and implementing secure Azure Virtual Desktop environments.