Azure Virtual Desktop

Ferroque has extensive experience in designing for use cases with a broad range of requirements affecting the delivery model and technologies used.

These include but not limited to:

• Factors affecting user data persistency
• Peripherals
• User location
• Compliance requirements
• Resource intensive apps
• Endpoints and Citrix client software
• Designing for elastic scalability
• High user turnover
• Minimizing technical debt
• Automation
• Balancing requirements with ease of management

If a use case exists, chances are we have tried-and-true solutions ready to go.

Yes. Profile strategy is an ever-evolving topic in the digital workspaces field, spurred on not just by technological innovation and prevalence of non-persistent use cases, but by new customer requirements for user experience roaming, backup, and recovery. The Ferroque team have extensive experience designing and deploying profile solutions that align to use case and corporate mandates. Since profile strategy is not a one-size-fits-all paradigm, it is often best to use different strategies for different workloads to reduce costs and management overhead. Furthermore, ongoing management of profiles is important to avoid technical debt and wasteful storage sprawl. Ferroque also has extensive experience designing profile solutions for environments with recovery requirements and in public cloud environments which have their own storage platform limitations to consider when designing for thousands of users. From traditional profiles to profile containerization and layers, Ferroque remains at the forefront of profile strategy innovation and thought leadership.

This is another niche area of expertise for Ferroque. We have designed dozens of environments with disaster recovery (DR) in mind in architectural variations of on-premises, cloud-to-cloud, and hybrid cloud and aligned to different scales of users and different recovery technology capabilities driven by SLAs. We have designed and deployed such platforms for industries including but not limited to finance, telecom, transportation, government, insurance,  and healthcare. 

Microsoft defers to the Azure Virtual Machine SLA for session hosts. However, as of April 2024, AVD still lacks financially-backed SLAs for the access and brokering services. For this reason, customers evaluating AVD may wish to consider the feasibility of AVD on its own, or whether pairing AVD with other solutions such as Workspot or Citrix would alleviate SLA concerns and extend benefits.

Absolutely. Our Managed Services benefit from the technological acumen of our consulting team and align to the ITIL framework. Our service offering is available in a co-managed model and a fully managed model packed with benefits and value uncommon in our industry. Please reach out to learn more.

Yes, however depending on your use cases, there may be challenges to relying solely on AVD’s native capabilities. The following considerations should be reviewed when determining if AVD on its own is the right direction:

• Limited Management Functions. AVD provides basic management and optimization capabilities which may become cumbersome at scale. Third-party tools can streamline virtual desktop deployment, improve cost management, and automate routine tasks including backup and recovery, allowing customers to leverage AVD more effectively.
• Peripheral Support. Peripheral support is limited in AVD which may create challenges for some use cases.
• Security Controls. AVD lacks robust, contextual, and multi-faceted security controls available on other platforms.
• SLAs. The access and brokering of AVD services lacks financially-backed SLAs making it potentially unsuitable on its own for organizations with mission-critical workloads, or organizations who wish to retain control of their SLAs to a greater degree. Third-party platforms can assist in overcoming this limitation.
• Protocol. AVD relies on the RDP protocol. While it has evolved over decades, it is not as adaptable or flexible as other platforms whose remoting protocols are optimized to withstand “last mile” client issues including latency and poor network links to a greater degree.
• Software Support. Some software solutions may not support AVD without third-party products the software has been certified to run on. Check with your software vendor for compatibility.
• Graphical Workloads. Use cases relying on GPUs and/or are otherwise graphics intensive such as CAD or multi-media rich use cases may find AVD on its own may not perform well in some scenarios. This can be alleviated with third-party platforms that help AVD overcome such limitations.

As of April 2024, yes. The multi-session versions of Windows 10 and 11 are available only in Azure, or on Azure Stack HCI which allows customers to run AVD and its multi-session features within their own datacentres which is useful in certain use cases. Learn more about Azure Virtual Desktops for Azure Stack HCI here. Customers who are not using Azure or are on-premises without Azure Stack HCI are limited to single-session instances of Windows 10 and 11, or the multi-session capabilities of the Windows Server OS.