Azure Virtual Desktop vs Windows Virtual Desktop

The two cloud versions of Windows are going to cause the most confusion. To add to the confusion is there are two versions of each. Windows 365 will come in business and Enterprise versions, and Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) is available in personal and pooled deployments. Both are based on an Azure Virtual Desktop control plane, but from there the similarities breakdown quickly.

Operating Systems Available on Windows 365 and AVD

Windows 365 can be deployed with Windows 10 or Windows 11 (on launch). Meanwhile, Azure Virtual Desktop supports Windows 10 Enterprise multi-session, Windows 10 Enterprise, Windows 7 Enterprise, Windows Server 2019, Windows Server 2016, and Windows Server 2012 R2.

Microsoft Desktop as a Service (DaaS) subscription models

All of the virtual desktop solutions require Azure Subscriptions, however Windows 365 subscriptions reside fully in Microsoft’s Azure subscription and will be fully managed by Microsoft at fixed costs. Meanwhile, Azure Virtual Desktop is entirely customer managed with flexible consumption based pricing.

Compute

Azure compute for Windows 365 will be 100% Microsoft managed, with a fixed cost and no direct admin access to the underlying Virtual Machines (VMs). In AVD, compute usage is customer managed with consumption based costs and additional flexibility in configuring VMs. AVD is going to remain the place to go if you need a monster video rendering machine with multiple 3090 GPUs and TBs of RAM.

Storage

Again, focused on ease of use and set up, Windows 365 provides fully managed storage with fixed pricing. Lack of admin access to the VMs can make it challenging to back up, but with Microsoft managing it, the hope is that it will not be required. For AVD, it is all about flexibility with OS Disks, FSLogix profiles, the ability to easily back up storage and VMs. 

Networking

Here is where Windows 365 Enterprise splits from business. Enterprise has fully customer-managed networking with flexible routing, IPs and security. Meanwhile Windows 365 Business will remain full Microsoft-managed with no flexibility. For AVD, networking flexibility is a requirement with no Microsoft management provided.

User Profiles

Windows 365 is a single-user managed desktop which will run in Microsoft’s Azure environment. As such, it will have a single user profile and no need for multi-user profile management.

In Azure Virtual Desktop, FSLogix is a profile container that holds user profiles in a Virtual Hard Disk v2(VHDX) file. When the user signs in to AVD FSLogix redirects to the data and settings in the container and the virtual drive is mounted to transparently integrate into the virtual desktop environment. In pooled multi-user AVD deployments FSLogix is mandatory to manage the individual user profiles in the pool. In Single user AVD instances, FSLogix is optional and while it is not required it does provide additional portability. 

User Identity

In Windows 365 business, only AD Join will be available, while in enterprise Hybrid AD Join will be required. There is no AD Domain Services support for either type of Windows 365 Subscription. With Azure Virtual Desktop, AD Domain Services is required and both Windows AD and Azure AD DS is supported. Native Azure AD join is currently on the road map for upcoming release.

Windows 365 Machine Types

While it is said that storage and compute is not flexible in Windows 365, the available selection of VMs is broad enough to meet most needs, ranging from a single CPU with 2gigs of RAM to 8 CPUs and 32 gigs of RAM.

Agile IT is a cloud first Microsoft partner with over 15 gold competencies including Windows and Devices, and Cloud Platform. If you want to leverage Desktop as a Service to empower you workforce, schedule a call to find out how to best use Windows 365 and Azure Virtual Desktop to reduce risk, support costs, and downtime while increasing productivity and mobility.

Image Credits: Jejim / Getty Images

As remote work became the default for many companies during the pandemic, it’s maybe no surprise that services like Microsoft’s Windows Virtual Desktop, which gives users access to a fully managed Windows 10 desktop experience from virtually anywhere, saw a lot of interest from large enterprises and a new crop of small businesses that suddenly had to find ways to better support their remote workers. That’s pretty much what Microsoft saw, too, which had originally targeted Windows Virtual Desktop at some of the world’s largest enterprises. And so as the user base changed, Microsoft’s vision for the product changed as well, leading it to now changing its name from Windows Virtual Desktop to Azure Virtual Desktop.

“When we first went GA with Windows Virtual Desktop, about a year and a half ago, the world was a very different place,” said Kam VedBrat, Microsoft’s general manager for Azure Virtual Desktop. “And to be blunt, we looked at the service and what we were building, who we were building it for, pretty differently. No one at that time had any idea that this global pandemic was going to happen and that it would cause so many organizations around the world and millions of people to have to essentially leave the office and work from home — and the role the service would play in enabling a lot of that.”

Image Credits: Microsoft

While the original idea was to help enterprises move their virtual desktop environments from their data centers to the cloud, the pandemic brought a slew of new use cases to Windows Azure Virtual Desktop. It now hosts anything from virtual school labs to the traditional remote enterprise use cases. These new users also have somewhat different needs and expertise from those users the service was originally meant for, so on top of today’s name change, the company is also launching a set of new features that should make it easier for new users to get started with using Azure Virtual Desktop.

Among those is a new Quickstart experience, which will soon launch in public preview. “One piece of feedback that we saw is that as so many organizations are looking at Azure Virtual Desktop to enable new scenarios for hybrid work, they want to get these environments up and running quickly to understand how they work, how their apps behave in them, how to think about app groups and host pools and some of the new concepts that are there,” VedBrat explained. Ideally, it should now only take a few clicks to set up a full virtual desktop environment from the Azure portal.

Also new in Azure Virtual Desktop is support for managing multi-session virtual machines (VMs) with Microsoft Endpoint Manager, Microsoft’s unified service for device management. This marks the first time Endpoint Manager is able to handle multi-session VMs, which are one of the biggest selling points for Azure Virtual Desktop, since it allows a business to host multiple users on the same machine running Windows 10 Enterprise in the cloud.

In addition, Azure Virtual Desktop now offers enhanced support for Azure Active Directory, in addition to a new per-user access pricing option (in addition to the cost of running on the Azure infrastructure) that will allow users to deliver apps to external users. This, Microsoft argues, will allow software vendors to deliver their apps as a SaaS solution, for example.

As for the name change, VedBrat argues that while Windows is obviously at the core of the experience, a lot of the service’s users care about the underlying Azure infrastructure as well, be that storage or networking, for example. “They look at that broader environment that they’re creating — that window estate that they’re creating in the cloud — and they see that as a larger thing and they look at a lot of Azure as part of that. So we felt like the right thing to do at this point, in order to address that broader view that our customers are taking, was to look at the new name,” he explained.

I thought Windows Virtual Desktop explained the core concept just fine, but nobody has ever accused me of being a marketing genius.