The most fundamental component of any cloud solution is the network. It is networking that will provide connectivity and security to your applications and solutions. This is most critical with an internet-accessible solution like Azure Virtual Desktop, so we need to properly build it and secure it.
In this course, we will help you design your Azure Virtual Desktop network components so you can not only gain insight into those Azure services but also understand how they integrate and relate to the Azure Virtual Desktop service and help you to pass the Azure Virtual Desktop Specialty exam.
Learning Objectives
- Understand Azure virtual desktop networking requirements
- Recommend the correct solution for network connectivity
- Implement your Azure Virtual Desktop networking solution
- Manage connectivity to the internet and on-premises networks
- Implement and manage network security
- Manage Azure Virtual Desktop session hosts using the Azure bastion service
- Monitor and troubleshoot network connectivity
Intended Audience
- Azure administrators with subject matter expertise in planning, delivering, and managing virtual desktop experiences and remote apps, for any device, on Azure
- Anyone looking to learn more about Azure Virtual Desktop
Prerequisites
To get the most out of this course, you should have knowledge of the following:
- Azure networking
- Network security
- Network monitoring and troubleshooting
Since latency is the enemy of good performance, we want to keep our latency as low as possible. The way that you can check your latency from your clients to AVD is with the Azure virtual desktop experience estimator. This web page will show you the roundtrip time in milliseconds from where your client is located to all the different Azure regions. The recommended guidance is to keep your latency under 120 milliseconds.
The second thing that will impact your performance is what your users are doing. Here's an Azure doc that give bandwidth estimates for different AVD workloads of light, medium, heavy, and power user. Now, what exactly do those workload types mean? Well, you see here, there's a link here that will take you to a different section of the docs which explains what those are.
A medium workload will use database entry applications, Word, static web pages, whereas a power user would be doing all of that plus things like Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator or CAD design. Notice as well that each workload type has a recommended bandwidth and that's really the key, even more so than the individual applications.
Finally, there's a great doc for RDP bandwidth requirements showing the estimated bandwidth used by remote graphics. In this table at the bottom you see a idle full desktop uses about 0.3 kilobits per second. Down at the bottom of the list, we can see playing back a full screen video at 3.1 megabits per second using an H.264 encoder. And if you really need to establish some tight levels of controls, here at the bottom of the page there's a way to use quality of service, or QoS, to shape your traffic and set up throttle rate limits using PowerShell.
Dean Cefola is a Principal Azure Engineer at Microsoft and has worked in the IT industry for over 20 years. Dean has been supporting Azure Virtual Desktop from the beginning and is the Microsoft FastTrack Global Leader for AVD.