in this episode I'm going to take you through everything you need to know to get you up and running with Azure Virtual Desktop one may almost call it the complete beginners's guide check it out today's video is sponsored by CISA who have just launched its new AI agent builder and it comes complete with pre-built readyto-use AI agents it's transforming the way IT teams work for more details check out the link below or visit them today at cisaya.com on today's episode I thought I'd take a look at Azure Virtual Desktop the ability to deliver remote desktops and applications to your business and work environments now there's a number of reasons why you might do this you want to deliver the same kind of template desktop in a call center perhaps or you might just want to have those old machines those old PCs uh have a new lease of life uh either way it's a fantastic solution so I'm going to take you through everything you need to know to get you up and running uh with this amazing technology now if you haven't subscribed to the channel I'd love you to come on board so bump the subscribe button up there and ring that bell and come and join my great learning community here and if you've got questions and comments as always you know what to do get those down below and I'll do my absolute best for you now um just to mention that if you've not signed up to my Patreon site uh this will give you access to full Microsoft courses monthly Zoom calls and a lot more so make sure that you sign up just here okay that's it for now uh hope you enjoy and uh get ready to learn here we go now first of all the step-by-step guide i'm going to do a search here for virtual networks now you can actually create this as part of the setup but I prefer to do this in advance i think you got a little bit more control so I'm just using a kind of demo environment here and I can see I've created a subscription i've got my resource group and I'm going to give my virtual network a name now uh I can choose the data center typically you would choose a data center that's closest to you obviously some security settings here i'm not going to bother with those just now but I am going to set the uh range the IP address range i'm going to do this as 10 uh 20 0 uh with a subnet of 16 here you see uh next I'm going to create a subnet so I'm just going to basically edit the default subnet there i'm going to change the name of the subnet so rather than calling it default you can call it something a bit more meaningful um so I'm just going to get rid of that i'm just going to call it HP1 subnet um you can see I want to use the IPv4 address space and you can also use IPv6 if you're using that as well i'm going to go in and set up a starting address for my subnet and you can see it looks good at the moment again with security I'm not using any kind of NAT gateway at the moment but again I'll cover this in a future session so I'm going to click on next and I think I'm pretty happy with this just now so I'm going to go ahead i'm going to set that up so the first thing that we need to do then is create our virtual network now uh once that's done uh we just create that that can take a few minutes i've kind of sped this demo up a little bit and you can see that the um uh deployment has now complete so once that's now complete we can now move on you can either go to the resource of course um but uh more likely I'm just going to do a search now for the u Microsoft Entra now for Azure Virtual Desktop typically you're going to have two types of users you're going to have a user and you're going to have an admin so um what I'm doing here is I've just create we've got like a couple of demo uh user accounts so I'm going to go into the groups here and in the groups I'm just going to create a couple of default groups click on new group and I'm going to create this is a security group and this is called my application group my DAG group here and again you can add an owner in if you want to but in this example I'm just adding in some members to the group so I've got two users i've got student one and student two so I'm going to just add that first student in here and he's a member of the DAG group so the second one is the re is the application group or the resource group rather I should say and uh I'm just going to add another user so this time I'm just going to add my second user account so this is uh student one as opposed to student two and I'm going to click on next and you can see that my remote app group is now created okay so two groups my DAG group and my remote app group there so one is for the remote desktop one is for the uh various applications so now that I've done that I can now flip back into the Azure portal and I'm going to click on Azure virtual desktop so this is basically where all the magic happens okay so I'm going to come into manage and the first thing that we need to create is a host pool in other words a pool of virtual machines that's going to act as the host so we've got the subscription and we select the resource group now if you haven't got a resource group you can just create one give the host pool a meaningful name and you want to choose the location that's closest to you um are you going to want to validate the environment so yes and this is important what's the purpose are you going to use it for a remote app or for a desktop option so for this demo I'm choosing remote app and then you can choose the host type so pulled tends to be for example in a call center you all you're all using the same type of machine or you can use just a a desktop or a a static desktop for like management and so on then you've got bread first and depth verse so breadth means that if you've got 50 machines it's just going to make the random use um to any random machine or depth first means that one machine is filled before moving to the next one then it says do you want to add actual virtual machines to your host pool and you can add these anytime by the way so I'm going to say yes I want to add them and I'm going to create a name prefix now in this example I'm just going to use sh again you can type in random or a random series of numbers either way it has to be random choose the location um and again you can set the infrastructure requirements so whether you want clustering and so on again I'm just keeping it simple now for the version of Windows 11 you can see I'm choosing a multi-session version and this is the magic this is where the magic happens whereas you would use a standard edition if it was just uh a remote desktop that you're going to assign to a specific user i'm going to install two virtual machines here and I'm using standard SSD drives at 128 gig and you can see it says did you want to install this into Intune i've said no and it says okay do you want to have a public inbound port and also you've noticed I've selected the subnet that I've just created at this point it says do you want to be part of active directory or entra ID well all my resources are in the cloud so of course I'm choosing enterra and again you just set up a user account here don't worry about this this can be changed later by the way okay so now that we've done that you just do a quick review just to make sure that you're happy with everything and uh once you're happy I am off it goes and it creates our host pool for us now this can take about 20 minutes depending on how many virtual machines you put into it so obviously you don't want to wait 20 minutes so some times goes by and you can now see that the deployment is in progress and it's now finished so now what I'm going to do is let's have a look at it what can we do with this host pool well you might want to deploy some applications to the host pool so for this we can simply go into the uh well you've got this thing called application groups here and I can go into the host pool itself and you can see before you start using the host pool the first thing you're going to want to do is assign some users to it so I can click onto assignments and you can see I'm assigning my DAG group uh to this particular host pool okay now um once you've assigned the user um you can either deploy applications of course um in this case it was a remote desktop solution so but again you can go in and you can you can add more if you want to so you can you can see here session desktop so I'm just I've got a a desktop here that I could use uh and so on so the nice thing about a host pool folks is that you can have uh many application groups and you can assign them to different departments different teams of people so I can come in here and I can say you know I I quite fancy creating a second application group so if that remote desktop is for one this is for my second group of users again just select the resource group so again typically you would want to keep everything in the same resource group keep it nice and tidy bearing in mind that a resource group is like a container it's almost like a department if you will select the host pool so again it's the same host pool that I'm using and you can see it's defaulted the location you can see it's already picked up that it's a remote app so it's a shared environment um so I'm not using a standard desktop i'll give the application group a name here so this is my office apps i'm going to click on next and again you can assign assignments here if you want to um again I can come back to that later but what I am going to do is I'm going to come in and add in some apps here so you can see I've got Microsoft Office um and there's many many different types of apps here so again I'm just going to bring in Microsoft Word um you can choose does it require a command line do you want to put some notes in and so on so you can do all of that um again I'm just going to review and create that so off it goes it creates the application group and we've now added in that first app so once you've done that you might want to add some more apps in okay so this once it just takes a couple of moments so that we're now in that office application group um and once that's been configured we can just simply go back to manage and applications and now you can see that Microsoft Word is here so as I said you might want to go back in and let's say let you might want to bring in Excel for example so we just put in the path for Excel again you can put in a little description and you can see it's already picked up the expected location path of the application so again just click on add and that takes a second and then we'll do let's just do one more i'm going to go in and we'll we'll add in uh let's say PowerPoint here okay so with PowerPoint uh again just add in that and just put in the uh application name and then we can put in a description so just bring in that and then pull in a description here and again just click on review and add and of course you could keep going with this if you wanted to so once you've added all the apps that you want um of course we've now assigned it we'll need to assign that to a group of users so for this we simply come into assignments and you can see there's nobody assigned i click on add and again I can now select the group of users that I want to give access to those particular apps or that application group so you can see this time I'm going to give access to the other group here so now that I've done that that's it i've assigned it so I've created the application group i've assigned some applications to that group and I've also assigned permissions to it so the next thing that I might want to do is now well now there you go now you can see I've got two application groups there so again you can create different application groups with different requirements if you want to and uh again it really depends on your uses now Andy what about things like command lines could I do like a command line interface absolutely so it doesn't need to be a for example a Microsoft Word document or something like that you can actually put in a command line so in this demo you can see I'm going into the file path option and I'm bringing in the path option for let's say uh the command line tool this could be PowerShell it could be anything that you want um you'll put in the application identifier so typically here tell it what it is so in this case it's a command prompt again the display name I'm just going to put in the same command prompt i can put in a description here as well and again does this require a command line no it doesn't um that means a command line to run it it doesn't require that so again I'm just going to click on next um of course oops sorry I forgot obviously give it a name that would be useful so the icon is important so that this appears on the user's desktop of course so now that you've done that I simply go and click on add and I'm happy with the way that this is looking and I can just click review and create and off it goes um finally coming in I'm now going to add in the uh permissions for the user so again I'm going to add this to a different user and add the user permission in so yeah we'll just give them this one here and just type in the us the remote app group yeah that's fine and then I'm going to click on select so what we've done then really simple created the command line published it to again to the application group and now we can just push that out to our users so you get a quick review and if you're happy with that I am i can just go and click on create it would tell you by the way if there was any errors before it wouldn't let you create it if there was errors by the way so again might take a little bit of time just to get that through so you can see chug chug chug a little bit of time goes by and that is now uh pretty much complete so we are now pretty much ready to go and that is that application group done with the application so once it's done obviously it will take you to the resource if you want to otherwise that you can always navigate to it so now I'm going to come into the re the um host pool and we're going to look at the RDP properties and you can see here that we've got a number of session oh tabs here which talk about the connection information the behavior if you want to set up device redirection and things like that and that's all little check boxes so every time you click on the check boxes you can see it creates this little script here which is useful um of course you can type that script in if you want to so finally the next thing we need to do of course is we need to download the remote desktop app now in this demo I'm just using a lab and this is the remote desktop uh typically now of course you would use the um Windows app so the newly named Windows app simply download it it very very similar kind of experience um just basically go ahead and install this so once this is finished we just basically just wait for it to load up for a second and then once it loads up what we do is let's get started and click on the subscribe button so the subscribe button obviously it's asking us for our Microsoft account so we can just type in our Microsoft account here and then click on next and of course put in our password now of course Microsoft are rolling out multiffactor authentication um so again you might see that coming soon um and now you can see that we've got our session host now the first thing that you'll notice is when I click onto the settings you can see it's just saying do you want to go ahead and use those default settings now that for the most part that might be fine but it you may not so uh this is where you can go in and you can say hey I want to use for example multiple displays so you know you might have a couple of displays on your desktop you might want to use a dedicated display you might want to configure things like the uh screen resolution uh again depending on how much bandwidth you've got access to um again fitting things to the window select your displays which one you want to be the primary display and so on so once you've made those choices uh you can then go ahead and fire up that remote desktop so I'm just going to go on ahead and double click it and you can see it just takes a moment just to uh fire up that uh desktop environment now in this demo you'll notice it's asking me for my credentials now during the configuration it is possible to set up single sign on so that you don't get this uh and in fact in a future video I'm going to talk about the identity components and that there so you can see I'm now running a Windows 11 machine um everything looks pretty good doesn't it so again I can uh just close that down if I want to um now you'll notice there's no apps in this particular version because I've uh in this that group that I signed up to doesn't have any apps but what would happen if I signed in as a user that does have access to those apps let's let's do that so I'm just going to click okay and close that session down and I'm going to go back in again and I'm this time I'm just going to subscribe but as a different user this time so this is the student one and student one does have access to those remote apps of course so click on sign in again just takes a second again same desktop this time though just give it a quick refresh and now you can see that those apps have now turned up so not only do we have the command prompt of course we've also got Excel Word and PowerPoint here so uh and again the cool thing is I can just click on that remote desktop or the command prompt rather and you can see it doesn't prompt or doesn't fire up the actual virtual machine or virtual desktop it just fires up the application so if you're familiar with the likes of Citrix technologies and so on this will be very familiar experience to you so as the remote desktop starts you can see it's just that application that's actually running so whether you're running Word Excel PowerPoint whatever the application you're going to get that seamless experience um and as far as the user is concerned um it looks and feels just like a local app i absolutely love this feature i think it absolutely rocks um okay so I'll just close that down and there you go that is remote desktop apps of course you can fire any of these up as well uh if you want to and you see here's Microsoft Word and you get a very similar experience absolutely awesome so there you have it azure virtual desktop remote desktops and applications how cool is that that's really good isn't it hey listen i really hope that you got a lot out of it and if you enjoyed the session you know give me a big thumbs up and bump that subscribe button and come and join us and uh continue your learning journey okay questions and comments as always get those down below and I'll be delighted to help okay that's it for this time i really appreciate you stopping by you stay safe