Tag: Azure Virtual Desktop

The Azure IaaS Book Of News – December 2022

Here’s all the news that I thought was interesting for Ops and Security folks working with Azure IaaS from December 2022.

Azure VMware Solution

  • Azure VMware Solution Advanced Monitoring: This solution add-on deploys a virtual machine running Telegraf in Azure with a managed identity that has contributor and metrics publisher access to the Azure VMware Solution private cloud object. Telegraf then connects to vCenter Server and NSX-T Manager via API and provides responses to API metric requests from the Azure portal.

Azure Kubernetes Service

  • Microsoft and Isovalent partner to bring next generation eBPF dataplane for cloud-native applications in Azure: Microsoft announces the strategic partnership with Isovalent to bring Cilium’s eBPF-powered networking data plane and enhanced features for Kubernetes and cloud-native infrastructure. Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS) will now be deployed with Cilium open-source data plane and natively integrated with Azure Container Networking Interface (CNI). Microsoft and Isovalent will enable Isovalent Cilium Enterprise as a Kubernetes container App offering onto Azure Container Marketplace. This will provide a one-click deployment solution to Azure Kubernetes clusters with Isovalent Cilium Enterprise advanced features.
  • Generally Available: Kubernetes 1.25 support in AKS: AKS support for Kubernetes release 1.25 is now generally available. Kubernetes 1.25 delivers 40 enhancements. This release includes new changes such as the removal of PodSecurityPolicy.

Azure Backup

Azure Virtual Desktop

Virtual Machines

  • Public preview: New Memory Optimized VM sizes – E96bsv5 and E112ibsv5: The new E96bsv5 and E112ibsv5 VM sizes part of the Azure Ebsv5 VM series offer the highest remote storage performances of any Azure VMs to date.  The new VMs can now achieve even higher VM-to-disk throughput and IOPS performance with up to 8,000 MBps and 260,000 IOPS.
  • Generally Available: Azure Dedicated Host – Restart: Azure Dedicated Host gives you more control over the hosts you deployed by giving you the option to restart any host. When undergoing a restart, the host and its associated VMs will restart while staying on the same underlying physical hardware.

Governance

  • Public preview: Use tag inheritance for cost management: You no longer need to ensure that every resource is tagged or rely on resource providers to support and emit tags in their billing pipeline for cost management. Aidan’s Note – Restricted to EA/MCA … which unreasonably sucks. The latest example of “cost management” excluding other customers.

App Services

Storage

Azure Site Recovery

  • Public Preview: Azure Site Recovery Higher Churn Support: Azure Site Recovery (ASR) has increased its data churn limit by approximately 2.5x to 50 MB/s per disk. With this, you can configure disaster recovery (DR) for Azure VMs having data churn up to 100 MB/s. This helps you to enable DR for more IO intensive workloads.

Networking

Miscellaneous

Understanding the Azure Virtual Desktop Resources

In this post, I will document the resources used in Azure Virtual Desktop, what they do, and how they interconnect.

This is a work-in-progress, so any updates I discover along the way will be added. You should also check out a similar post on Azure Image Builder.

Host Pool – Microsoft.DesktopVirtualization/hostpools

The host pool documents the configuration of the hosts that will provide the desktops/applications. Note that a Host Pool resource ID is required to create an Application Group.

Note, the VMs themselves are deployed using a linked template when you use the Azure Portal. My deployment used the “managed disks” template. This template deploys the VMs, runs some DSC, joins the machines to your domain. There is also a task to update the host pool.

The result of running Microsoft.DesktopVirtualization/hostpools does not create the VMs – it just manages any VMs added to the Host Pool.

The mandatory properties appear to be:

  • hostPoolType: BYODesktop, Personal, or Pooled.
  • loadBalancerType: BreadthFirst, DepthFirst, or Persistent.
  • preferredAppGroupType: Persistent, None, or RailApplications.

The full set of properties can be found in the REST API documentation.

Application Group – Microsoft.DesktopVirtualization/applicationgroups

The Application Group documents the applications, user associations (the Desktop Virtualization User role is assigned to users/groups), and is associated with a Host Pool; therefore you must deploy a Host Pool resource before you deploy the planned Application Group.

The mandatory values appear to be:

  • hostPoolArmPath: The resource ID of the associated Host Pool
  • applicationGroupType: Desktop or RemoteApp

We know that Windows 365 (AKA “Cloud PC”) is built on Azure Virtual Desktop. Proof of that is in ARM, with a true/false property called cloudPcResource.

The REST API documentation has complete documentation of the properties.

Workspace – Microsoft.DesktopVirtualization/workspaces

The Azure Virtual Desktop Workspace is the glue that holds everything together. The Workspace can be associated with no, 1, or many Application Groups via a non-mandatory array value called applicationGroupReferences. You can build a Workspace before your Application Groups and update this value later. Or you can build the (1) Host Pool(s), (2) Application Group(s), followed by the Workspace.

The mandatory values appear to be:

  • applicationGroupReferences: An array value with 0+ items, each being the resource ID of an Application Group.

    Virtual Machines

The Host Pool will require virtual machines; these are created as a separate deployment. There’s nothing special here; they are virtual machines created from the Marketplace or from your own generalised image (captured or Shared Image Gallery). Two actions must be done to the VMs:

  • Domain Join: Either (legacy) ADDS (including Azure AD DS or Windows Server ADDS) or an Azure AD Join (a recent feature add).
  • Virtual Desktop agent: DSC will be used to deploy the agent. This will make an outbound connection to the Host Pool and register the VM.

AAD, AADDS, or ADDS? I prefer ADDS. This is because:

  • Most of the controls that you need are in Group Policy and AAD doesn’t do Group Policy.
  • AADDS relies on AAD which is a single-region service. If that region has AAD issues (and this happens pretty frequently) then your Azure Virtual Desktop farm is dead.
  • Third-party applications typically expect ADDS and will not support AADDS/AAD, even if it “works”.