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AVD on bare-metal hardware (or non-Azure Stack HCI)

agressiv 26 Reputation points
2022-06-14T00:41:34.86+00:00

When Azure Virtual Desktop was first announced as "RDmi" (Remote Desktop Modern Infrastructure), the basic premise is that the brokers/infrastructure would be in Azure, but your RDSH hosts (could) still be on-prem.  The clunky RDSH gateway/broker/load balancing was a thing of the past.

Well, I've discovered that you can install Server 2019/2022 RDSH on a bare metal server in a private datacenter, load the AVD agent up, and it works just fine, even RDP ShortPath!

I see no documentation that you can't/shouldn't do this, and my local Microsoft contact told me not to, but I still don't see why I couldn't - unless someone can point me to documentation that says I can't.

"Why would you want to?"  Let's just say that currently we use almost 400 very fast bare metal Citrix boxes on-prem and I'd love to just convert that rather than spend 2 million dollars on an Azure Stack HCI solution that just gets me needless complexity.  We'd simply remove the Citrix VDA and install the AVD agent.  No cost to us, no hyper-converged infrastructure to maintain.  These 400 servers are all identical.  Having them on Hyperconverged buys us nothing and we already have automation in place for that hardware.

Yes, some of the features might not work, but not many of the AVD features work on Azure Stack HCI anyway.

Thanks for any insight!

Azure Virtual Desktop
Azure Virtual Desktop
A Microsoft desktop and app virtualization service that runs on Azure. Previously known as Windows Virtual Desktop.
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  1. Prrudram-MSFT 28,281 Reputation points Microsoft Employee Moderator
    2022-06-14T08:25:20.353+00:00

    Hello @agressiv ,

    Thank you for reaching out to the Microsoft Q&A platform. Happy to answer your question.

    I totally understand your approach to make use of available servers at your on-premises, and it may or may not work however, it is not supported from Microsoft. Most importantly it is clearly called out that it's not a compliant solution and it would be in breach of AVD's licensing conditions - something you can find at Commercial Licensing Terms (microsoft.com)

    **Azure Virtual Desktop Conditions: **
    The Azure Virtual Desktop control plane may only be used to manage Azure Virtual Desktop VMs running on Azure. Windows Enterprise multi-session is limited for use on Azure Virtual Desktop VMs running on Azure only.

    AVD is an Azure Service which supports only VMs running in Azure datacenters or on Azure Stack HCI (in Preview). It is called out on the first page of our docs that this is for Azure and throughout all references to AVD are inclusive of Azure - What is Azure Virtual Desktop? - Azure | Microsoft Learn.

    Hope this helps!

    --please don't forget to upvote and accept as answer if the reply is helpful--

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