Choosing Azure Instance Types for Microsoft AVD

In an earlier blog,  we had discussed what is Microsoft AVD – Azure Virtual Desktop and why it is gaining popularity. In this blog, we present various community and vendor resources that can help you choose the right Azure instances for your Microsoft AVD deployment.

Updates: This blog is updated as the community releases new material.

Update Jan 2024: In October 2023, Microsoft themselves published some advice on how to choose the best instance for use when running session host virtual machines (VM) on Remote Desktop Services or Azure Virtual Desktop, see: Session host virtual machine sizing guidelines for Azure Virtual Desktop and Remote Desktop Services | Microsoft Learn. There’s a lot of useful advice but their definition of “Heavy” user workloads as including PowerPoint and Outlook do direct users towards instances such as the D8s_v5 and D8s_v4 as a minimum.

In a recent survey of 1,050 digital workspace professionals, eG Innovations and xenappblog reported that 34% of respondents were already using Microsoft AVD. AVD was also the most popular DaaS service in the cloud. Click here to see the results of this survey

Key Questions Regarding AVD Deployment on Azure

Here, at eG Innovations, we offer a wealth of monitoring and simulation tools to allow you to monitor what real users are experiencing when accessing Microsoft AVD. You can also use our tools to benchmark user experience when using different configurations for AVD. There are a vast array of different Azure instances, storage, and networking options available to administrators.

At the same time, Microsoft AVD is a relatively new product. Hence, many administrators are looking for data points and recommendations from the community on what they can expect when using different Azure instances and methodologies they can use to baseline and sanity-check configuration choices.

Digital workspace administrators want to know:

• Which Azure instances to select from the large number of instance types available for AVD?
• What user densities they can expect with multi-user AVD relative to their traditional RDSH deployments (How many users can be supported for a VM)?
• What user-densities to expect for a single-user VDI?
• What GPU, networking, and storage is needed?
• Cost vs. density balance

So, I thought I’d collect some community and vendor data around benchmarking and baselining specific Azure instances to use as external data points. This is really a collection of links to other people’s real-world methods and experiences that I can reference if folks ask me for external independent data. I’d like to keep updating this list as new instances become available – so if you spot or generate any data-testing specific instances that might guide choice, do comment on this blog or let me know so that I can add it!

Choosing the Right Azure Instance Types for AVD

For many larger organizations looking to use Microsoft AVD, they are choosing to retain their existing Citrix management stack and organizational expertise by leveraging a Citrix Management Stack on Azure. Often, their administrators have experience with deploying both Citrix Virtual Apps (was XenApp) via RDSH or full VDI Citrix Virtual Desktops (formally XenDesktop) on on-premises hardware. With multi-user Windows 10 being only available on AVD via Azure, to offer a full native desktop experience (vs. what was a “Windows 10 desktop experience” via RDS on a Windows Server OS), many are looking for to move RDS workloads across and have expectations on user densities thatcan be achieved.

In practice, most reference architecture seem to be looking to a few specific Azure families of instances, notably the D and F series, and the NV series when GPUs are required.

Citrix Consulting themselves state: “Most Citrix deployments use the D-Series and F-Series instance types. The D-Series are commonly used for the Citrix infrastructure components and sometimes for the user workloads when they require extra memory beyond what is found in the F-Series instance types. F-Series instance types are the most common in the field for user workloads because of their faster processors which bring with them the perception of responsiveness.”

Further details as to why are within an excellent recent reference architecture (Feb 2021) from Loay Shbeilat: Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops Service on Azure.

There is also some guidance for Azure instance sizing available from Microsoft including guidance on multi-user usage and considerations, available here.

Update April 2022: A very nice article by Jon Welling, overviewing and mapping instance types to use cases that goes beyond VDI/DaaS use cases: How to Choose the Best Virtual Machine For Your Workload in Azure (cbtnuggets.com).

Nagaraj Arumugam, System and Network Engineer at Vembu Technologies, has a great blog summarizing the differences between the different Azure instance series relevant to EUC and VDI use cases. It’s a great summary reference, although the comprehensive Microsoft site will always be the ultimate reference.

Update 2nd March 2023: Microsoft have recently announced some new instance families with a public preview of Azure Dlsv5/Dldsv5 Virtual Machines, promising to offer “up to 30 percent increased performance and better price-to-performance than the Fsv2 VMs”, Compute Intensive workloads gain better price-performance on Azure Dlsv5/Dldsv5 VM in public preview – Microsoft Community Hub. These may well be a newer alternative to the F-Series options popular for Citrix and AVD type use cases for the community to evaluate.

Community and Vendor Resources detailing Azure Instance Choices