Delivering an Exceptional AVD Experience

June 21, 2023

When it comes to utilizing Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) to deliver virtual desktops and applications to your end-users, optimizing your environment for both performance and cost cannot be overstated.

Your ultimate goal is to offer an exceptional user experience while simultaneously minimizing your cloud expenditure and maximizing your return on investment (ROI).

However, determining whether you have selected the appropriate instance type for your AVD workloads can take time and effort. How can you ensure your configuration is well-matched with user behavior and demand? How do you validate the effectiveness of your environment, both before and following any modifications?

How to Choose the Best Instance Type for AVD Workloads

IT system administrators and their teams must consider computing power, memory, storage capacity, and networking capabilities. By analyzing your users’ requirements, you can determine the optimal instance type that balances performance and cost efficiency.

Here are 3 tips for choosing the right instance type:

1. Align your configuration with user behavior and demand. This is essential for monitoring and analyzing usage patterns and resource utilization. By gathering insights into user activity, application usage, and peak demand periods, you can make informed decisions about scaling up or down your AVD environment and adjusting instance types as necessary to meet user requirements without overspending on unnecessary resources.
2. Validate your AVD environment before and after implementing changes to ensure a seamless user experience. Conducting thorough validation and performance benchmarking can help identify potential bottlenecks or performance issues. By comparing performance metrics and user feedback, you can evaluate the impact of configuration changes and fine-tune your environment to achieve optimal performance and cost-effectiveness.
3. Regularly review and optimize your AVD environment. Consider instance types, user behavior, and demand patterns to strike the right balance between performance and cost. By implementing best practices and leveraging monitoring tools, you can continuously improve your AVD deployment and deliver an exceptional user experience while maximizing the value of your investment in the Azure cloud.

Validating and Proactively Monitoring AVD

Whether you are overseeing the operations of an AVD (Azure Virtual Desktop) environment or strategizing your migration, Login Enterprise can equip you with tools to ensure success.

Using Login Enterprise, organizations can gain unparalleled visibility into the user experience within their AVD environment. This visibility empowers you to accurately assess the costs of transitioning your workloads to the cloud or optimizing your existing deployment. Moreover, Login Enterprise enables you to spot potential savings and identify areas for improvement, ultimately leading to a more efficient and cost-effective AVD environment.

How to scale resources to blanace performance and cost savings in AVD:

• Effectively benchmark and compare different instance types in terms of their price-to-performance ratio. For instance, you can conduct tests to determine the number of users that can be supported on a Standard D4s v3 instance compared to a Standard D8s v3 instance while also considering the cost per hour for each instance. This approach empowers you to identify the most suitable instance type for your AVD workloads, preventing overprovisioning or under-provisioning your resources.

• Validate your AVD environment before and after implementing changes such as updates, patches, migrations, or new applications. For instance, you can evaluate the impact of a Windows 10 update on login times, application responsiveness, and resource consumption within your AVD environment. This comprehensive validation allows you to validate the effects of changes on user experience, enabling you to identify potential performance degradation or downtime and take proactive measures to mitigate them.

• Gain the advantage of continuous monitoring for your AVD environment. Proactively detect any issues or bottlenecks that may impact user experience. By continuously monitoring metrics such as CPU utilization, disk performance, and network responsiveness within your AVD environment, you can observe how these factors evolve and correlate with user load and activity. This proactive monitoring approach empowers you to troubleshoot and resolve problems swiftly, preventing user complaints or dissatisfaction by addressing potential issues before they escalate.

Take AVD to the Next Level

With Login Enterprise, you can unleash the full potential of AVD and deliver a consistent and reliable user experience while optimizing your cloud costs and capacity.

Making well-informed decisions and effectively assessing the costs of transitioning your workloads to the cloud is crucial. Evaluating your existing deployment can uncover potential savings and improvements if you have already migrated.

Ready to learn about AVD and other cloud-based solutions? Check out one of our most popular webinars, Comparing Cloud-Based Workspaces: Windows 365 vs. Azure Virtual Desktop.