Virtual Desktop Hosting

Virtual desktop hosting with Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD).  Personal or pooled desktops are available.  The hosting team provides the hosting platform and environment and the Desktop team supports the desktop operating system.

Benefits & Features

• Pay for consumption: Cloud providers have large pools of resources and you are charged only for what you consume out of that pool.  This means that when you are hosting your virtual desktop infrastructure in the cloud, only consuming what you need is more important for cost savings.  Luckily cloud providers have a number of tools to help scale up or down your virtual desktop infrastructure to match demand.  This differs from on-premise VDI hosting where a large upfront purchase is required to buy hardware that meets your peak demand, and that hardware may sit dormant for a large portion of it's life due to the peak demand being a rare occurence.
   
• No physical hardware dependency: If the underlying server hosting your desktop fails, the desktop will automatically restart on a different host while online.  This disruption will likely be invisible to users of the system.
   
• Smaller footprint: Virtualizing desktops in the cloud decreases the number of physical boxes that the University must use. This means a smaller datacenter, with the resulting decreases in cooling and electrical costs.
   
• Hardware costs: Because virtualization allows for greater efficiency of resources, you don't have to manage any underlying physical hardware, saving money both on upfront hardware costs and on maintenance.
   
• Flexibility and agility: Desktop virtualization allows for the quick creation of different desktop environments, those environments can then be scaled up or down as demand requires.  Desktops are made available during business hours and outside of business hours there is a short delay if you attempt to log in while your machine is made available.  All of this automation saves us cost and allows us to manage the environment more easily.

Pricing

Pricing varies greatly due to the number of instance sizes available on Azure.  For personal desktops we've created the pricing table below to estimate the yearly cost per user for 3 different performance tiers (many more are available if needed) and estimated the runtime at 200 hours per month.  If you don't intend to be logged into your virtual desktop for all working hours of the week (8a-5p, M-F) then you can expect your cost to be less than the estimate, relative to the amount of working hours you expect.  Estimating the cost of pooled desktops is a bit trickier because the number of desktops running is based on the number of users logged into the system and scales up and down dynamically with load.  In general though if your performance requirements are in one of the 3 tiers below you can achieve lower operating costs with pooled desktops and we can help you get an estimate of what that would cost on our platform.

Support

For the most efficient support experience, please submit a ticket using the request form on this page. Alternatively, contact your campus Help Center location via email, by phone, or in person.

FAQ

In the past, ITS would cover the cost of VMs needed for online classes. Example a class teaching online SPSS or MS Access, a VM pool would be made for that class. From what I understand that will no longer happen and each college will need to find funding for these hosted desktops and apps?

Yes each user group who wants access to AVD will have to pay for their usage on the platform.  Generally all we need is a cost object to get started with the provisioning process.

How do the faculty/students access it, through a web page, an app, or both?

Both methods of access are available.  There is a web portal that can be accessed from any internet connected HTML capable device and there are applications available for both Windows and Mac for accessing the systems.

If we go with a hosted app, do most apps work? Any limitations problems we should be aware of?

We would have to test each one on a case-by-case basis.  There are no major platform limitations that I am aware of.  If it helps I can tell you that these systems are just standard Windows virtual machines with network addresses that are reachable on campus.  The RemoteApp hosts are a Windows Desktop that presents multiple sessions of the application to the remote users.

If someone wants a plug in for hosted Office program, possible? Or would that need to be a hosted desktop?

May require case-by-case some testing.  If the plug-in is stored in your user profile that should work fine and install properly.  If it's something that needs to be installed locally on the RemoteApp host, we can do that but it may be an all-or-nothing install for all the users of that RemoteApp host.

Hosted app able to save to OneDrive or would that need a full desktop?

Yeah this should work fine for m365 applications.  If users have access to these applications via the office 365 portal they should use them there before requesting a RemoteApp host for the application.

Is there a reason I would consider a desktop and not an app?

Yes definitely, if the user wants to make changes or requires local admin on the end device they will need their own desktop.  The major consideration however is likely going to be around cost, giving the best recommendation will require us to know the user groups usage pattern.  With RemoteApp we have to size the system to accommodate the number of users who will be online at any given time, so for an example use case of 30 students who only use the system a few hours a week, we would have to design the system to allow a max of 30 students during the entire time window that they would be logging in, let's say 8a-5p.  The applications performance requirements will dictate the size of the RemoteApp host and how many we need to run for the 30 students to have a good experience.  But let's just say 3 hosts that can have 10 users each, you would need to have at least one host online between 8-5 and the system would add more hosts to accommodate more than 10 users.  So if more than 10 users request to log in, another host is turned on to meet the request.  For this example 1-10 users require 1 host, 11-20 users require 2 hosts, and so on... There are thousands of possibilities for how we slice up those systems and how big we size them it all depends on the users and their usage patterns/requirements.

With a desktop we have more cost management options available, but the easiest way to think about it is that the system is designed around a single end users usage pattern and not the groups.  So we would create 30 individual virtual machines that would sit offline until a user login request is received, it then takes 3-5 minutes for the desktop to come online and the user is logged in.  Then when users log out of their system it is turned off.  With this design you will only pay for the virtual machine when a user is logged in.  We then apply session policies to log off idle users and disconnect any users that have been logged in for too long (4 hours usually but configurable).

I assume hosted app would be a lot cheaper than the price estimates listed, is this true?  I guess my students would only be in there for a few hours a week. If a class of 30 needed potential access but only one person ever used it, are we only charged for the one user, and at the end of the semester? Minimum charge?

When talking remote applications it's a bit more complicated than just 1 user used it for x amount of hours.  The 'minimum charge' in my example above would be the cost to run the virtual machine that accommodates 10 users for the app during the login window we design, so for 8-5 we have 9 hours of runtime per day, or about 250 hours/month.  The performance requirements of the app will determine the virtual machine size but lets say 10 users want to split 8Cores/16GB of RAM with a B8IS v2 which costs $0.2950/hour multiply that by 250 and that gets us to $73.75/month minimum vm cost, scaled out to 3 hosts for a max userbase of 30 and that's a maximum vm cost of $221.25/month with our login window restriction.  There is also a small cost associated with the storage on the machine but in general that isn't a whole lot unless your application requires a lot of storage. Obviously the price goes up as your application performance requirements do.  Unfortunately to complicate things even further this is all adjustable on the fly so we can change the virtual machine sizing if we need later down the road, although we know it can be hard to get funding approval for a dynamic cost like this so we would rather start over designed and scale down cost than start under designed and have to scale up.  If you go with a personal desktop designk and only one person uses their desktop for 2 hours in that month, you're only charged to run that users virtual machine for 2 hours, again the virtual machine sizing is all dependent upon App and user requirements.  To really determine which option would be best we would need to know the user groups usage pattern, as well as the application and user performance requirements.

Is billing handled by semester or yearly?

Payment is truly 'pay as you go' so you'll actually be charged monthly for what you consume, due to a delay with our pricing vendor you may not actually be charged until a few months after your consumption.  If these systems will be used the next semester we can remove access and leave the systems offline until the next semester, you'll only be charged for the virtual machine storage in that off window and not the runtime.  That cost might be worth not having to recreate the work to build new systems for the next semester though.  Really all your preference as you're now paying for consumption of the service.