Announcing General Availability of Autoscale for Pooled Host Pools on Azure Virtual Desktop

We shared at Microsoft Inspire that one of our most anticipated features, Autoscale for pooled host pools, will soon be Generally Available on Azure Virtual Desktop. Today, we are happy to announce that Autoscale for pooled host pools is officially Generally Available!

Autoscale for Pooled Host Pools

Autoscale on Azure Virtual Desktop is a native automated scaling solution that automatically turns session host virtual machines on and off according to the schedule and capacity thresholds that you define to fit your workload. With Autoscale, you can save costs by shutting down idle session hosts during off-peak hours while ensuring there’s enough capacity to meet your users’ needs during peak hours. 

The following capabilities are now generally available with Autoscale for pooled host pools: 

• You can now use the Desktop Virtualization Power On Off Contributor built in RBAC role instead of a custom RBAC role to grant permissions to Azure Virtual Desktop to scale the session hosts in your host pool.
• Scaling plans are now available in almost all regions where Azure Virtual Desktop host pool objects are, including Australia East and all US and Canada regions.

In addition, stay tuned for announcements on the following capabilities that are coming soon:

• Scaling plans in UK and Japan regions.
• The ability to port Autoscale diagnostics logs to Log Analytics for analysis and parsing.
• The ability to create schedules as proxy resources in PowerShell for easier configuration.

Getting Started

To enable this feature, simply create a scaling plan, define schedules for when virtual machines should be turned on or off, and assign the scaling plan to one or more host pools.

Learn more about setting up autoscale and how Autoscale works. Watch this Inspire session for a demo.