CS 021: Windows Virtual Desktop First Impression

Hey, what's up everybody? Welcome back to The Cloud Secrets Podcast. And today I'm going to talk about the WVD, the Windows Virtual Desktop within Azure, and how we are going to set up our first customer. And well, first go to the theme song and then I'll let you know where we are.

So last week we started using or implementing WVD for one of our larger customers at M IT Services. And before we could start, because one of the requirements was that they get single sign-on so they can login with one user account and password, or use two-factor authentication if they want to. But for now, let's keep it simple and let's start with using their email address as login.

And so they can log in at the current private cloud, at the local desktops and all the devices and even within WVD. So for that we've set up an express route, which is a direct connection to Azure from Azure to our data center. And, well, usually when you set up a connection, it's pretty easy because, for me, it's just a cable. And you plug it into a switch, or router, or whatever and traffic goes along. But in this case with this customer, we've faced challenges every single time. And I don't know why.

Maybe Murphy's law or something, I don't know. But I accept those challenges. Don't get me wrong, but we fix them. But one of the transceivers of the fiber optics on the supplier car ... on the side of our supplier was malfunctioning. The receiver, we received the optic ... I'm sorry, the transceiver that we receive didn't pass the self-test, so we had to buy a new one. The second one was coming online, but ... well, it sent some traffic through, but they were getting a huge, huge, huge amount of packet loss at the other end of the fiber optic cable.

Finally, I put it in the OEM product just to get ahead, because we couldn't wait any longer. So yesterday we received yet again a new transceiver, so we got to try them today. So it took us a couple of, I don't know, weeks to set up the express route with all the BGP routing set up, et cetera. And afterwards it was working. And the nice part is for testing purposes we only have 100 megabits or so, but you can burst through like 500 which is really nice.

So the first peak of data you set up a connection or the transmission, you can burst up to all the way of 500 and then it flats on 100 megabytes per second. After that, we set up single sign-on. So I believe it was Monday, by the time you hear this will be a week further, but no problem there. We started setting up all the applications and yesterday we finished up all the applications that the customer needs for their proof of concept. We sold them a POC (Proof of concept) so they can actually test it before deciding if they would like to start using WVD. And today, or yesterday my colleague started with policies, the group policies.

And today I hope we ... when I arrive at the office, I'm on my way now as you can probably hear, I'm recording this in my car. When I get at the office, I hope we can start testing, make some tweaks there and I hope I can show the customer something at the end of the day. I'll keep you posted. These are going to be short episodes where I just want to document my journey since WVD is just launched, and I want to share our experiences and the difficulties we encounter and share with you how we solved them or if we implemented things in a certain way.

So if you got questions regarding WVD, please comment below, please respond on the podcast. Please review, rate and subscribe. You're doing not only me but also all the IT guys a huge favor, because the more subscriptions we get and the more reviews we get and ratings, more people are able to find us. I'm at the office now. I'm going to see how far my colleague got yesterday and I'll give you an update too. Okay. Until next time, bye bye, Marcel Martens.