For end users to have a good experience interacting with any IT systems these days, Single Sign-On (SSO) is a must-have. I can’t emphasize enough how annoying and non-productive it is to log in multiple times to access corporate resources or systems. When using Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) or Windows 365, there is no exception configuring SSO is a must.
One of the core elements of Windows 365 is the Reprovisioning feature, which allows IT Administrators to recreate a user’s Cloud PC within minutes. Even though the old Cloud PC is being deleted from Intune, the device object still exists in Azure AD. Because Reprovisioning of Cloud PCs might be done quite frequently depending on how many Cloud PCs and issues the users face. The number of device objects in Azure AD might increase quite fast.
Manually going into the Microsoft Endpoint Manager portal to check for failures is not an ideal workflow if you ask me. When failures or anything unintended happens, they should be reported automatically to you outside the system for a better response time. With this new feature, we are differently going a step in the right direction. There are currently three pre-defined alert rules we can use.
You might face yourself in a position where you have to secure files and the current state of a Cloud PC for investigation. With the Place Cloud PC under review feature, you can take a snapshot of a Cloud PC to secure data and safely hand it over for investigation. In this blog post, I will go through the prerequisite, how to use the feature and what it means for the end-user.
Sending the user an email with guidelines on connecting before their Cloud PC is ready could lead the user to try to connect before the Cloud PC is ready. Wouldn’t it be cool if a user only gets an email when their Cloud PC is provisioned and ready to use? in my mind, that is the optimal way of giving the information. I will go through the aspect of how this is working.
Knowing how often users connect to their Cloud PC gives you an idea if they are using it or not. From here, you can investigate if there is a reason for a user not to use the Cloud PC as first intended. Ultimately you can track down the users who no longer need a Cloud PC and can save that license cost. as you might know, there is no built-in usage report in the MEM portal. Therefore I have cooperated with Donna Ryan on a PowerShell script that will gather information about login count over a period and the last login date.
Resizing a Windows 365 Enterprise Cloud PC is very easy and can be done directly within the MEM portal. I like this feature and how seamless it’s working. However, we cannot resize our Cloud PC if we have assigned the license through group-based licensing.
Group-based licensing is a must to gain better visibility and control of your licenses. Therefore it’s a big issue if you ask me.
This article will showcase the PowerShell script I have created to resize group-based licensed Cloud PC.
Many types of people are using virtualization on local devices. For organizations that use Windows 365 Enterprise, Nested virtualization is now available. This empowers users to create virtual instances on their Cloud PC as they would on their local device. Users can use the following systems with this new feature:
In this article, I will go through the requirement for nested virtualization on Cloud PC and how to get started with it by enabling Hyper-V.
For the past four months, I have been working on a Cloud PC on my Macbook pro 2021 as my end-to-end device every day. I have been surprised by how good it is working, but there are also some flaws I came across. In this article, I will try to cover all the aspects of my experience with Windows in the cloud from a Mac.
Google country redirection is very annoying when having the virtual machine in another country than your users. Services like google detect the users’ location (internet breakout) and redirect them to a language page based on that. he issue is not within Windows 365 / CloudPC. Google redirects users based on where it thinks users are coming from (Internet breakout). Imagine the virtual machine are located in West Europe (Netherlands), then Google will display everything in Dutch.
When a user is logged into their Cloud PC, non-admin users cannot see the Restart button in the power menu. Therefore they can only restart their Cloud PC from the Windows 365 web interface. I don’t think this is an issue if users only use the Windows 365 web interface. However, I see a “user experience” issue if they are using the Remote Desktop Client instead.
Redirecting local resources such as printers and local drives can be helpful for users to work properly and more efficient. Users can choose which local resources they would like to redirect. There might be reasons to prevent redirection of printers, clipboards, audio, etc.
Let’s look at what options are available and how we, as administrators, can manage them.
If you manage Active Directory, Windows Server deployment, or something else, PowerShell is an essential tool to master. When it comes to Windows 365, there is no difference. The capability to deploy or get information on environments is handy, especially if you want to automate something.
This article will go through how to get information about your Windows 365 environment with PowerShell. But how is it possible when there is no PowerShell module for Windows 365?
To create an Azure Managed image, you have to “Generalize” the VM. once it’s Generalized, it will become unusable. You have to create a new VM and begin from scratch if any changes are needed. You can create a temporary VM to resolve this, but it doesn’t come without some flaws.
It is essential to secure identities and environments from hackers in today’s world, and Windows 365 is no exception. Azure Multi-factor Authentication (MFA) In combination with conditional Access, makes securing your Windows 365 environment even easier and more manageable.
Windows 365 Enterprise can be used with predefined Windows 10/11 images, but you can also use a custom image when deploying cloud PCs to users. This might be a good idea if you wish to preconfigure something in the image before deploying.
Microsoft has done it more straightforward to export Azure Role Assignments for a subscription. They have added the Download role assignments button in the Azure portal under Subscriptions. However, when I’m working with customers with many Subscriptions, I’ll like to get an overview of all the subscriptions at once. Therefore I use PowerShell the export Role Assignments for all Subscriptions at once.
Users can send diagnostic data for IT administrators to review. But what kind of data does it send, and where do we find them? As for now, I haven’t been able to find any official Microsoft documentation that describes the “Send Diagnostics” in the Experience monitor. This article will go through the findings I made and how I use the data to do more efficient troubleshooting in Azure Virtual Desktop.
Google redirects users based on their location (internet breakout). This is a problem when using Azure Virtual Desktop. This is an issue when the virtual machines are located in another country than the users. A Google page will then meet the users in an unfamiliar language.
A guide on how to prepare a resource migration between Azure subscriptions. This will give you an idea of approaching a resource migration project and validating if your source environment can run on your destination environment. There are serval things to be aware of.
If you deploy an Azure Virtual machine(VM) into a wrong Azure virtual network(Vnet) or you would like to move an existing VM to another Vnet, you will need to deploy a new VM into that Vnet. unfortunately, we can’t move Azure VM’s between Vnet’s, out of the box. You can, of course, establish Vnet peering… Read More »
Moving your traditional website from a Windows IIS server to Azure App Service has never been easier. Microsoft provides a great tool to migrate to Azure App Service, it’s called App Service Migration Assessment Tool. To be able to use this tool, you must have access to the server where your IIS site is located.I… Read More »
Azure provides a simple way to connect on-premise workstations to Azure resources like VM and other services with a Point-To-Site VPN. This can be really handy if you have some external partners that need to connect to your environment in Azure, or just have a couple of users that needs special access to some services… Read More »
Enable Modern authentication to Secure your user idenitites, with Multi-factor authentication. Many companies have a lot of data in public cloud, that data is usually secured by user identities, it’s common that users choose a weak and common password, that are easy for hackers to recognize.
Setup Android and Android Enterprise to connect to corporate Wifi with certificate by using Custom OMA-URI Settings.
BitLocker configuration tab in Intune does have a silent install function, but the silent function currently only works for users that are local administrators. users will have to get the latest Windows version 1809 for the silent installation to work without being local administrators.If your users isn’t running 1809 there is still an option to… Read More »