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3 Ways to Improve Azure Virtual Desktop Performance

Amol Dalvi
Nerdio

As remote work becomes a standard business practice, virtual desktops continue to gain popularity as a primary means of delivering data and applications to end users. Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD), for example, is seeing strong adoption due to its ease of deployment and its portal which enables desktop and application management from one interface. Enterprises can also control costs since they pay for virtual servers only when desktops are running, and can scale in or out depending on desktop needs. A recent survey indicated over half of the respondents (58%) expected to have AVD technology in production within two years.

Like many emerging platforms, AVD is still in its early days and IT pros are evolving, as well, in their approach to deploying and managing the service. The platform is seeing strong traction among SMB market enterprises of less than 1,000 users who like the scalability and related cost control features.

While AVD is gaining traction, IT teams are looking for ways to better deliver application performance and satisfy the end user's expectations of seamless productivity. The survey found the two biggest complaints from IT pros are slow application performance (47%) and slow logons (40%). Supporting video calls, more efficient monitoring of all AVD elements and solving latency problems are among other key issues.

Stepping Up Virtual Machine Performance

End users are on the front lines of experiencing sluggish virtual desktop performance. If it takes what feels like forever to do a simple task like opening up Word or Excel, IT will get unwanted help desk calls. For example, if your end users in a specific department are running intensive workloads, such as graphic design, confirm they are getting the right number of resources in terms of virtual machine (VM) compute power by having the optimum number of users in any one AVD host pool.

Microsoft has a guide for sizing session host VMs that makes a good point that IT needs to continually monitor VM usage, sizing up and down accordingly. If there are no graphics processing units (GPU) or graphics-intensive workloads, it is also recommended to stay with smaller VMs since they can be more easily updated — another performance related practice. With fewer users on one VM, it is more likely IT will find no one signed on and can shut it down to make updates as necessary if they are manually managing the environment.

Accommodating Multi-Media Environments

Zoom, Teams, intensive graphics use, and eventually more metaverse style collaboration, are all driving more performance concerns about latency, cloud costs, and the ability to provide an end user experience expected by Gen Z and Gen Y workers.

Stop-and-start video screens, too long video downloads; these are some examples in which latency detracts from performance. Since so many meetings are now video conferencing it's a good practice to run load and stress scenarios to ensure the remote desktop session will have adequate bandwidth to provide a satisfying experience.

Latency and quality of multimedia transmission is also affected by the connection round trip time (RTT) from the current location, through the AVD service to the Azure region in which IT can deploy VMs. Check AVD's estimator to determine the lowest RTT relevant to your users' location and make session host adjustments as needed.

Lastly, consider GPUs for better performance in video, 3D design and other graphics applications. AVD GPU virtual machines will enable graphics accelerated rendering and help AVD end users be more efficient and productive.

Monitoring all Performance Aspects

Improving AVD performance, or for that matter, any critical platform, depends on diligent monitoring. AVD offers native tools for monitoring and there are also third-party options to enhance monitoring and management. According to the survey, almost half of the IT pros say they need end-to-end monitoring that includes session hosts, control plane and Azure AD.

Further efficiency can be gained by using tools with a central dashboard that can record and analyze data in usage, active users, session host, CPUs, and other metrics to view performance and potentially identify cost savings. IT can have a per-user view to identify latency, use patterns and pinpoint application delays hampering performance.

To better load balance, IT can also view VM performance to ensure the number of users per host session is at an optimum level. Applications themselves can be analyzed to better understand user behavior and resource allocation.

Focusing on Performance

While AVD is still somewhat in the early adoption phase, performance themes are beginning to emerge. Fine tuning the allocation of users per host session and supplying employees with supportive technology like GPUs will help to diminish latency issues. Constantly monitoring and testing for performance issues and syncing with user behavior will, in the long term, create a solid foundation for using virtual desktops — the emerging go-to solution for a remote workforce.

Amol Dalvi is VP, Product, at Nerdio

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3 Ways to Improve Azure Virtual Desktop Performance

Amol Dalvi
Nerdio

As remote work becomes a standard business practice, virtual desktops continue to gain popularity as a primary means of delivering data and applications to end users. Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD), for example, is seeing strong adoption due to its ease of deployment and its portal which enables desktop and application management from one interface. Enterprises can also control costs since they pay for virtual servers only when desktops are running, and can scale in or out depending on desktop needs. A recent survey indicated over half of the respondents (58%) expected to have AVD technology in production within two years.

Like many emerging platforms, AVD is still in its early days and IT pros are evolving, as well, in their approach to deploying and managing the service. The platform is seeing strong traction among SMB market enterprises of less than 1,000 users who like the scalability and related cost control features.

While AVD is gaining traction, IT teams are looking for ways to better deliver application performance and satisfy the end user's expectations of seamless productivity. The survey found the two biggest complaints from IT pros are slow application performance (47%) and slow logons (40%). Supporting video calls, more efficient monitoring of all AVD elements and solving latency problems are among other key issues.

Stepping Up Virtual Machine Performance

End users are on the front lines of experiencing sluggish virtual desktop performance. If it takes what feels like forever to do a simple task like opening up Word or Excel, IT will get unwanted help desk calls. For example, if your end users in a specific department are running intensive workloads, such as graphic design, confirm they are getting the right number of resources in terms of virtual machine (VM) compute power by having the optimum number of users in any one AVD host pool.

Microsoft has a guide for sizing session host VMs that makes a good point that IT needs to continually monitor VM usage, sizing up and down accordingly. If there are no graphics processing units (GPU) or graphics-intensive workloads, it is also recommended to stay with smaller VMs since they can be more easily updated — another performance related practice. With fewer users on one VM, it is more likely IT will find no one signed on and can shut it down to make updates as necessary if they are manually managing the environment.

Accommodating Multi-Media Environments

Zoom, Teams, intensive graphics use, and eventually more metaverse style collaboration, are all driving more performance concerns about latency, cloud costs, and the ability to provide an end user experience expected by Gen Z and Gen Y workers.

Stop-and-start video screens, too long video downloads; these are some examples in which latency detracts from performance. Since so many meetings are now video conferencing it's a good practice to run load and stress scenarios to ensure the remote desktop session will have adequate bandwidth to provide a satisfying experience.

Latency and quality of multimedia transmission is also affected by the connection round trip time (RTT) from the current location, through the AVD service to the Azure region in which IT can deploy VMs. Check AVD's estimator to determine the lowest RTT relevant to your users' location and make session host adjustments as needed.

Lastly, consider GPUs for better performance in video, 3D design and other graphics applications. AVD GPU virtual machines will enable graphics accelerated rendering and help AVD end users be more efficient and productive.

Monitoring all Performance Aspects

Improving AVD performance, or for that matter, any critical platform, depends on diligent monitoring. AVD offers native tools for monitoring and there are also third-party options to enhance monitoring and management. According to the survey, almost half of the IT pros say they need end-to-end monitoring that includes session hosts, control plane and Azure AD.

Further efficiency can be gained by using tools with a central dashboard that can record and analyze data in usage, active users, session host, CPUs, and other metrics to view performance and potentially identify cost savings. IT can have a per-user view to identify latency, use patterns and pinpoint application delays hampering performance.

To better load balance, IT can also view VM performance to ensure the number of users per host session is at an optimum level. Applications themselves can be analyzed to better understand user behavior and resource allocation.

Focusing on Performance

While AVD is still somewhat in the early adoption phase, performance themes are beginning to emerge. Fine tuning the allocation of users per host session and supplying employees with supportive technology like GPUs will help to diminish latency issues. Constantly monitoring and testing for performance issues and syncing with user behavior will, in the long term, create a solid foundation for using virtual desktops — the emerging go-to solution for a remote workforce.

Amol Dalvi is VP, Product, at Nerdio

Hot Topics

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From growing reliance on FinOps teams to the increasing attention on artificial intelligence (AI), and software licensing, the Flexera 2025 State of the Cloud Report digs into how organizations are improving cloud spend efficiency, while tackling the complexities of emerging technologies ...

Today, organizations are generating and processing more data than ever before. From training AI models to running complex analytics, massive datasets have become the backbone of innovation. However, as businesses embrace the cloud for its scalability and flexibility, a new challenge arises: managing the soaring costs of storing and processing this data ...

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OpenTelemetry (OTel) arrived with a grand promise: a unified, vendor-neutral standard for observability data (traces, metrics, logs) that would free engineers from vendor lock-in and provide deeper insights into complex systems ... No powerful technology comes without its challenges, and OpenTelemetry is no exception. The engineers we spoke with were frank about the friction points they've encountered ...

Enterprises are turning to AI-powered software platforms to make IT management more intelligent and ensure their systems and technology meet business needs for efficiency, lowers costs and innovation, according to new research from Information Services Group ...

The power of Kubernetes lies in its ability to orchestrate containerized applications with unparalleled efficiency. Yet, this power comes at a cost: the dynamic, distributed, and ephemeral nature of its architecture creates a monitoring challenge akin to tracking a constantly shifting, interconnected network of fleeting entities ... Due to the dynamic and complex nature of Kubernetes, monitoring poses a substantial challenge for DevOps and platform engineers. Here are the primary obstacles ...

The perception of IT has undergone a remarkable transformation in recent years. What was once viewed primarily as a cost center has transformed into a pivotal force driving business innovation and market leadership ... As someone who has witnessed and helped drive this evolution, it's become clear to me that the most successful organizations share a common thread: they've mastered the art of leveraging IT advancements to achieve measurable business outcomes ...

More than half (51%) of companies are already leveraging AI agents, according to the PagerDuty Agentic AI Survey. Agentic AI adoption is poised to accelerate faster than generative AI (GenAI) while reshaping automation and decision-making across industries ...

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Real privacy protection thanks to technology and processes is often portrayed as too hard and too costly to implement. So the most common strategy is to do as little as possible just to conform to formal requirements of current and incoming regulations. This is a missed opportunity ...

The expanding use of AI is driving enterprise interest in data operations (DataOps) to orchestrate data integration and processing and improve data quality and validity, according to a new report from Information Services Group (ISG) ...