Azure Virtual Desktop - Windows 10 / 11 multi session - maximum number of users per session host?

Question

Azure Virtual Desktop - Windows 10 / 11 multi session - maximum number of users per session host?

Corp Jones 1

Hi All

We were looking at Azure AVD, either Win 10 or Win 11 multi session, thinking to keep it simple so less things to go wrong and not look at FSlogix and just create 1 powerful session host for up to 30 users so we don't have to worry about profile management with multiple session hosts, they have very light needs generally with just office apps.

Questions:

1) Is there a user limit per session host for Win 10 / 11 multi user?  

2) Any recommendations on what spec to go for the session host? mostly office apps used so pretty light usage.

Advice appreciated :)

Rhys Jones 1 Reputation point

2022-10-01T11:54:53.127+00:00

I would consider 2 - 3 host for 30 users, load balancing and redundancy and overall performance and usability for your users

If your worried about fxlogix take a look at a product called nerdio it’s an overlay for azure and really makes deploying and managing azure virtual desktop with fslogix a breeze

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Rhys Jones 1 Reputation point

2022-10-01T11:54:53.127+00:00

I would consider 2 - 3 host for 30 users, load balancing and redundancy and overall performance and usability for your users

If your worried about fxlogix take a look at a product called nerdio it’s an overlay for azure and really makes deploying and managing azure virtual desktop with fslogix a breeze

Answer 1

@Corp Jones

Welcome to Microsoft Q&A Platform, thanks for posting your query here.

Your approach is especially for cost-saving approach which is provided by depth-first load balancing algorithm. For depth-first load balancing algorithm, you can set the MaxSessionLimit to 999999 in theory. You can check from the following link.

However, it depends on the user profile having load, executing processes on session hosts. So, you should make a profiling before deployment to isolate different user profiles and types into different pools to provide the best experience, performance and satisfaction. Instead of connecting all the users to a single session host VM having big compute size, I recommend use multiple session hosts having logical sizes to share load and build a highly available environment. Of course you can host dozens of users in a single session host but it can go into single point of failure to lost all the session. So, designing is huge critical with this approach and direction.

That said there is no artificial limit on the sessions per VM on Multi-Session. It is only limited by the resources of the VM (CPU, Memory, Disk I/O). It is not recommend to build a host pool consisting of a single VM for 30 users. If that VM goes down for what ever reason, even for Maintenance, no user would be able to work anymore.
So, even just for HA reasons, I would recommend to use at least 2 VMs+FSlogix.

Here is the document that has all the limits documented. Request you to check this once.

When using pooled host pools in Azure Virtual Desktop with the Windows 11 Enterprise multi-session operating system (OS). The following tables list the maximum suggested number of users per virtual central processing unit (vCPU) and the minimum VM configuration for each workload.

Hope this helps.
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Azure Virtual Desktop - Windows 10 / 11 multi session - maximum number of users per session host?

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