 So hello, and welcome to episode five in our third series season of Rock to the Cloud, which once again, I just say a huge thanks to you all for staying with us on this series. As we say every week, we really do love spending this time with you to discuss all topics around Windows Server 2022 and Microsoft Hybrid Cloud solutions. As you know, in each episode of From Rock to the Cloud, we bring in some of the world's most foremost figures in Windows Server and Hybrid to help you get whatever you need or that just what you want to know about it. And per the usual, if you have any questions about the episode, make sure you pop them into the comments below. We'd love to hear from you. So the agenda today is, well, the episode today is all about virtual desktop with Azure Stack HCI. And for the next 30 minutes, I'll be catching up with none other than Ellen Kirby. I'll let you introduce yourself in a second, Helen. We've also got some elements later in the show that you guys can get involved with. So please do stick around. So, you know, if you've been following the series, you will know that by now we'd like to bring to you the world's leading voices in Windows Server and Hybrid Cloud. And today's no exception on today's episode. As I mentioned, we're joined by the one and only Ellen Kirby. Ellen, can you please introduce yourself to the audience watching? Sure, Jason. Well, it's very nice of you guys to invite me here today. I'm really excited to talk to everybody about the advancements we're making with Azure Virtual Desktop. But I want to take a second and talk a little bit about what my role is within the team managing Azure Hybrid technologies. I'm part of Azure CPE, which stands for customer and partner engineering. We work with customers and of course, our OEMs, ISV partners, to understand and better prioritize the different types of technologies that we're bringing to the product. So feature functionality capabilities and tooling like AVD and understanding customer signals so that we can better manage how we're bringing these improvements to the products and provide customers with a better end-to-end scenario on how they're adapting Azure Hybrid tools. Fantastic. So do you think we should jump into today's topic, virtual desktop with Azure Stack HCI? Probably makes sense. Sounds great. But look, as I understand, you were part of the Microsoft engineering team that influenced AV as your virtual desktop hybrid solution from its inception. So I suppose as a result of your hard work and persistence, we now know that AVD is your virtual desktop, let's keep AVD for simplicity's sake, is coming to HCI. Can you please tell the audience why you drove this development so hard? And I suppose the key benefits customers are speaking to you about and are seeing by deploying an AVD solution that extends to Azure Stack HCI? Absolutely. So it's kind of interesting. I actually spent the first several decades of my career being the customer and understanding what the needs were around the different companies I worked for in deploying virtual desktop. So we can go all the way back to tooling, like remote desktop terminal services way back in the early Windows Server days and the evolution of how we're bringing virtual desktops to customers has been really critical, especially in the last few years with the ramping up of COVID and folks being forced to work from home. And in a lot of cases, the reinventing of how customers and users interact with these technologies. So one of the things I found interesting as we got into calendar year 2020 and started to talk about Azure Stack HCI becoming generally available was how can we leverage tooling that we have available today to improve that experience for our customer base and their users? And one of the ones that was really a passion project for me was understanding signal around Azure Virtual Desktop and the benefits that you get exclusively from it and how we could expand that to a hybrid model. So I spend a little bit of time reaching out to a lot of different customers in different types of verticals across different sizes and shapes, small, medium business enterprise and really tried to understand in my conversations with them what would be the need to keep these workloads on premise as opposed to just running everything out in Azure Virtual Desktop and Azure. There's a great tool, it's got great capabilities, unique capabilities. Why do you want to keep workloads on premise? And I found that a lot of customers were looking for a variety of different solutions to fill needs around keeping legacy applications accessible, having latency requirements where they're running things from remote locations or and this one has been really critical for a lot of countries data sovereignty challenges because again you may not have an Azure cloud that sits in your particular country and that may limit you from being able to run critical workloads up in Azure Virtual Desktop. So I was really excited to hear about the stories that customers had and what they were looking for in a more simplified deployment solution for their virtual desktop needs and the ability to run workloads whether they ran in Azure or on-prem and have that consistent experience for all their users. Okay, so you must have had some pretty interesting conversations. I mean was that like a six months, 12 months, 18 month exploratory finding or was it pretty much instance in your head that you knew this is a requirement and I think is kind of where I'm going with this, Ellen, right? Yeah, from the customer background, I knew this was a requirement. I knew this was something that I had talked to engineering about as a customer with the desire to have this capability. When AVD first came out when it was Windows Virtual Desktop, I remember being at an exciting session and saying, guys, when are we bringing part of this on premise? This is this needs to be something that we can leverage and take advantage of because it really reduces down the complexity of managing your virtual desktop experience because all that control plane happens in Azure, so you're not building all that additional workload to manage on premise. But it was probably about a three to six month experience to really gain all of that customer feedback and develop it in a way where I could go to the engineering leadership teams and say, this is something we need to invest in at Microsoft. Excellent. So what would you say are some of the unique benefits that AVD can bring to a non-premises environment versus, I suppose, the competition? No, it's a great question. And it's one that I think brings so much clarity to adopting this product. One of the biggest benefits is the ability to run multi-session with Windows 10 and Windows 11 client. And that's very unique to Azure Virtual Desktop. And it's an ability that a lot of customers are really needing to embrace, especially as they evolve past some of the capabilities that you can run with remote desktop services. Another that I think has been really interesting in terms of the desire is this overall benefit of what we're doing with a tooling called RDP short path, which actually allows you to broker the connection through Azure. And then once the workloads are authenticated against and accessible in your data center, then they're just actually doing that straight communication and you're not having to continue to build traffic patterns back and forth to Azure. And that really, I think, simplifies down the management and the performance for customers so that they can take the most benefit of accessing workloads that are critical to them right in that same data center experience. Okay, excellent. I'm just making some notes here. I'm going to have a recap at the end, Ali. And yeah, maybe I'm not going to get everything. So hopefully my recap, you can recap back to me, but let's see. How does this differ from traditional Windows server-based deployments, would you say? Yeah, I think that leads toward this concept of that multi-session Win 10 and Windows 11 that I was talking about. With our traditional Windows server-based deployments or remote desktop services, customers are really in that situation deploying out and giving their user base access to resources that are running on a Windows server OS platform. And a lot of applications, especially if you think about Office Suite and the Evolution of Office Suite being really targeted to run on top of these client-based operating systems, you start really getting into a situation there where a customer experience can be very, very tricky to emulate on Windows server. And so we've, for many, many years, because of the ability to have multiple sessions on a Windows server platform with remote desktop services, just leverage that. With Azure Virtual Desktop, you're able to give your users that Windows 10 or Windows 11 experience with all the benefits of that as an operating system and allow multiple users in your environment to connect to that same spun up virtual machine that's running either in Azure or on Azure Stack HCI. So with that, I suppose, would that give you a better performance ultimately? Or would you say there's performance gains? I would definitely say so because when you think about the teams that build Windows server versus client, they're very different in how they approach the build out of those technologies because the client experience is inherently more open, has more capabilities and interactivity for a user. And what we're driving toward on a server-based experience is to be very secure and locked down and limited on that surface attack. So it can be a very difficult thing to design out and deploy out applications running on top of Windows server that actually give you a good performance experience from a user accessing them and running those applications. It's similar vein to running virtual machines, right, to an extent. Stripping down what you need. Any other unique features that provide value for deploying AVD on-premise that you can maybe touch upon? Yeah, but one of the really unique things for me is this concept of reducing down this management architecture. In competitive offerings and even in RDS-type deployments, traditionally there's a lot of overhead to how you manage the way that your user base connects into the environment and gets access to the resources they need. You need gateways, you need delivery controllers, there's a whole just platform technology that you're building in it can often take a long time to even get it added and adjusted and configured and manage the way you need it to deliver the types of virtual desktop standards and application experience since you're trying to give with these solutions. So what's interesting about AVD and the exclusivity of that is all of that is running contained in a matured control plane that runs in Azure. So as a customer, the only thing that you're having to do is take your Azure Stack HCI environment and expose that host pool so that you can run your infrastructure solution on your on-prem offering and then be able to that point leverage all those great tools that are built into that control plane so that you can navigate and assign who needs access to what where in your environment. So I think that simplification and the reduction in the complexity is extremely beneficial and very unique. The other which I touched on in that first comment was this concept of that RDP short path. So bringing down the amount of travel that has to happen as different pieces of communication occur between the user experience and what's actually running on that virtual machine has really improved overall what a customer is experiencing when they're connecting to an Azure virtual desktop and running it because we all know many of us that have administered virtual desktops for years know customers complain because they know the difference between when they're running on a laptop versus when they're running on a virtual machine and this gives them a much more interactive experience. It feels more like they're just natively able to interact with it. Got it. So you just paused on my machine there actually so I thought I was about to crash and burn. Thankfully not you're still here with us or I'm still or thankfully maybe not for the audience that I'm still here too but hey so look listen that was really insightful. We're going to keep this one pretty short and sweet I think this week but that was really insightful Ellie. I'm going to recap at the end of the show as I say you can recap back to me but you know let's move on to the part of the show which we call the server acronym review and like everybody involved in the tech world I just love a long confused acronym that doesn't make any sense but luckily for us our producers have found a few server acronyms to show us hopefully their server and potentially hybrid who knows this is all out of my hands I have no idea but luckily for us they have got them and I'm hoping you can put them on the screen and let's spot and see if we can guess what they are so what we got here. Oh that's a good one. C-A-B well I know this to be a gentleman that doesn't treat you very well or it's a computer aided design software. That's right yes very heavily process intensive if I'm not mistaken. It is but again I like to think of it as a cat not a cat. Yeah indeed. I want to see ID perhaps. CSOM I have not got a clue. No idea. I would have to take a stab at that one I'm trying to think what that would be. Operations management perhaps at the end. Could be I'm going to say the C stands for cloud. So I was thinking of a cloud service. They got us again they got us again. My head is in the cloud sorry. That's good I like heads in cloud. Again this is just insane I have no idea what this is. It probably stands for something to do with with Microsoft online services but I'm not sure. Do we have any more guys? No I think that's it thankfully because I got none of those. So look we'd also love you guys to pop your thoughts in the comments section below tell us what you think about these acronyms and look before we go before we wrap up Helen let me just look at my recap notes here. So just a couple of key things why AVD because of some of the legacy applications the latency the data sovereignty clearly big drivers running things locally with Azure Stack HCI on premise and some of the key benefits would be multi-session for Windows 10 and Windows 11 and as you mentioned the RDP short path to give you those I suppose improvements for running those remote virtual desktop on I suppose while running remotely to coin your phrase. But look thanks so much for the for tuning into this episode guys and this episode of From Rock to the Cloud keeping out right here on the docs.microsoft.com LinkedIn Microsoft Server and Partner Club and the IT Ops Talk channel on YouTube for the next episode remember to drop your thoughts in the comments line below and as always as we like to do Ellie if we can just have a quick thumbs up as our thumbnail for the show here we go again listen thank you Ellie and I do believe we may be seeing you again at some point in the future looking forward to it absolutely thanks again guys and thank you producers