New opportunities to grow your practice with Azure Virtual Desktop

The need to enable hybrid remote work is here to stay, and Microsoft and our partners need to continue to help customers in migrating and modernizing their existing VDI ecosystems to the cloud. This week in our, Microsoft Inspire session we reviewed the latest innovations and the additional value we are building into Azure Virtual Desktop.

When we think about adding new value for customers with Azure Virtual Desktop, we focus on several key areas:

Improving customer experience

This spring, we rolled out the full suite of on Azure Virtual Desktop, including:

• Teams Live Captions
• Teams Multi-window and Call Me
• Teams background effects, including background blur
• Teams Give and Take Control

Plus, Teams optimizations in our macOS client are now generally available. Combined, these updates help ensure that customers and their employees can enjoy a virtualized Microsoft Teams experience that is comparable to what’s available locally.

Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP Shortpath) for public networks will be in GA soon. RDP Shortpath establishes a direct UDP-based transport between Remote Desktop Client and Session Host, offering customers better reliability and consistent latency on managed networks, for a more responsive experience.

Multimedia redirection is in public preview, ensuring customers enjoy a smoother video playback experience in the Azure Virtual Desktop browser, as well as allowing them access to more media controls. 

Earlier this month we announced support for the NVads A10 v5 series virtual machines, powered by NVIDIA A10 GPUs. We’re excited to provide the latest technology designed to accelerate the intense workloads of customers like game developers, engineers, graphic designers, and data scientists.

Optimizing cost and expanding business opportunity

Our upcoming Azure Virtual Desktop product updates can help customers optimize costs and support partner business opportunities.

One of our most anticipated features is Autoscale (currently in public preview) which lets IT admins set up schedules for when their VMs start and stop while still making sure resources are available if employees need to connect in off hours. This reduces costs associated with VMs that are not actively in use. See a demo in the Inspire session on demand to take a deeper dive into how Autoscale works.

A great way to expand partner business with Azure Virtual Desktop is with Remote App Streaming. We’ve introduced a new pricing option so now partners can offer customers monthly per-user access to the Azure Virtual Desktop service for app streaming to create a low-latency, high-performance user experience from virtually anywhere on any device.

With Scheduled Agent Updates, IT admins can specify the time of day they want to update the Azure Virtual Desktop agent, side-by-side stack, and Geneva Monitoring agent. Deploying agents at convenient times such as outside peak business hours — avoids interrupting business critical work.

Expanded footprint of Azure Virtual Desktop gateways ensure capacity wherever customers want to go. New expansion service metadata geographies now include Japan and Australia.

Azure Virtual Desktop Insights for host pools is now available in public preview. It allows customers to report at scale across multiple host pools.

Azure Virtual Desktop for Azure Stack HCI is a hyper-converged infrastructure solution that customers can deploy in their datacenters and use to extend their on-premises infrastructure to Azure. It delivers total control over the network environment and data locality of the applications running on Azure Virtual Desktop.

Thank you and stay connected

It has been a privilege to work together with partners and customers as we navigate this new world of hybrid work and drive the growth of the Azure Virtual Desktop service. Thank you for continuing on this journey with us.

For more information on newly released and upcoming features, watch the Inspire OnDemand session and bookmark the Azure Virtual Desktop blog.