Enhancing the performance of Azure Virtual Desktop

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. For example, Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) is seeing strong adoption due to its ease of deployment and its portal, which enables your IT team to manage desktops and applications from a single interface. AVD also helps you control costs as you only pay for virtual servers when desktops are running and can scale depending on your needs.

While AVD is gaining traction amongst our customers, IT teams are looking for ways to deliver better application performance and satisfy the end user's expectations of seamless productivity. Two of the biggest challenges we see regarding AVD are slow application performance and slow logons. Supporting video calls, more efficient monitoring of all AVD elements and solving latency problems are critical issues.

Accommodating multi-media environments

Zoom, Teams, intensive graphics use, and regular collaboration are all driving more performance concerns about latency, cloud costs, and the ability to provide a certain level of end-user experience.

Videos buffering lengthy downloads are just some examples of latency detracting from performance. The rise in remote working has increased the demand for video conferencing, and the surge in AI tools such as Microsoft Copilot has increased this demand further. Users recognise AI's time-saving capabilities in terms of writing meeting reports and identifying actions from calls. Still, the technology they use daily must be powerful enough to meet their requirements.

With the increased demand for video conferencing, running load and stress scenarios are good practices to ensure the remote desktop session has adequate bandwidth to provide a satisfying experience.

Latency and quality of multi-media transmission are 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.

Lastly, GPUs should be considered 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.

 
Efficiency can be gained by using tools with a central dashboard that can record and analyse 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 determine latency, and use patterns, and pinpoint application delays that hamper performance.

IT can also view VM performance to improve load balance and ensure the optimum user number per host session. Applications themselves can be analysed to understand user behaviour and resource allocation better.

Focusing on performance

Fine-tuning the allocation of users per host session and supplying employees with supportive technology like GPUs will help to diminish latency issues. In the long term, constantly monitoring and testing for performance issues and syncing with user behaviour will create a solid foundation for using virtual desktops — the emerging go-to solution for a remote workforce.