Automated scaling and cost management of AVD

The client.

This leading global insurance group delivers innovative insurance solutions to their clients by leveraging their ability to thoroughly understand risks and liabilities to create legacy solutions.

The background.

Our client had embarked on a significant transformation programme and had moved from a traditional on-premise, Horizon View VDI platform onto Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD). This fitted with their strategy to leverage public cloud services (specifically SaaS and PaaS based) and maximise the use of existing investments (in this case Microsoft 365).

The problem.

There were a series of challenges that we were consulted on:-

There were concerns about the capability of native AVD tools to monitor and manage the environment.
There were challenges with the Application Deployment Process
There were concerns about the ongoing costs associated with running the environment and wanted dynamic scaling.

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See different use cases for Azure Virtual Desktop:

The solution.

FIT hold the Azure Virtual Desktop speciality and were consulted based upon our experience of implementing and supporting AVD environments on an ongoing basis.

Once the technical team understood the challenges and objectives, FIT recommended that a 3^rd party tooling (which was designed to plug some of the platforms weaknesses) was implemented.

The Nerdio for AVD tool (now Nerdio for Enterprise) was implemented. This can be deployed to an existing Azure Virtual Desktop environment although its certainly preferred to use Nerdio from day one. There were a handful of permission related challenges with deploying Nerdio retrospectively, but these were overcome with an element of trial and error.

The features.

Nerdio provides a management and orchestration plane and is vastly superior to the native tools that Microsoft provide. The features that were seen as desirable were:-

The capability to automate scaling and shut down processes. This meant that the desktops allocated were aligned to demand and hosts could be switched off at times of known inactivity.
As a result of the dynamic scaling and automation of host shut-downs, this presented the opportunity to avoid unnecessary consumption costs.
Nerdio provided multiple options for application delivery within AVD. Core applications such as Microsoft office and Firefox could be deployed via automated installation at build time, and the new AppAttach format is supported for packaged line of business applications.
Whilst not a primary driver, the general monitoring and management capabilities plugged a number of holes and pleased the IT Operations team. Specifically the ability to monitor the performance journey of each user, from desktop to AVD host.

A virtual desktop experience that just works.

We take responsibility for desktop management and user satisfaction. Click below for one of our team to chat with you further about AVD.

Case Study

Automated scaling and cost management of Azure Virtual Desktop

Industry

Insurance

Size

2500 users

Sites

28 Globally

The client.

The background.

The problem.

I

I

See different use cases for Azure Virtual Desktop:

The solution.

The features.

A virtual desktop experience that just works.

The outcome.

Elasticity of resources accommodating the fluctuation of users on the platform due to the pandemic and need to work from home

Shorter time to resolution on end user issues due to the enhanced environment monitoring and visibility of user experience.

50% Azure resource cost savings due to scaling and shut down

Swift deployment of application deployment and associated updates, significantly reducing the overhead involved in these processes.

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