Pass Microsoft Azure AZ-140 Exam in First Attempt Easily

Quick Start

1. Exercise: Azure Virtual Desktop Experience Estimator

In this exercise, I want you to use the Windows Virtual Desktop experience. Estimator. This link and this assessment tool that I will provide in the Resources section of this lecture are used to estimate the quality of the experience the users of the WVD Windows Virtual Desktop will receive when connecting to Windows Virtual Desktop. How is that possible and how is that being done? Actually, this link, this tool from Microsoft Windows Virtual Desktop Experience Estimator, is also the tool that can answer the most common question that we usually get, which is: To which region of Azure shall I deploy my workloads? So basically what this tool does is estimate the round-trip time from your current location through the Windows Virtual Desktop Service or whatever source you have in Azure to each Azure region in which you can deploy the virtual machines. It also says the highlighted Azure region is the one with the lowest connection round-trip time from your current location, the times displayed or estimated, and the intent to help assess and improve user experience quality for blah, blah, blah. And you can read the following: So what I want you to do is go to this link, which you can find in the Resources section of this lecture, and see which region is recommended for you with the minimum round-trip time in milliseconds. For example, right now it shows that Germany-West Central is the one with the minimum round-trip time, followed by Switzerland or France. Sometimes it shows West Europe as the one recommended for me. So I would actually recommend checking it at different times throughout the day or through the week so you can select the most appropriate one to be used for you. Just go to the link used, the Windows Virtual Desktop Experience Estimator, and take note of the region that is recommended for you based on this tool.

2. Azure Cost Estimation Tool - Azure Calculator

In the courses I present. I need my students to understand the cost of the designs we make. And thus I use the Azure Calculator tool, which is a tool from Microsoft to provide the cost estimations for the products that you use in your design. So to reach the Azure Calculator tool, go to Google and search for Azure Calculator. This is the one that you will need to use. If you click on it, you will go to the Azure Pricing Calculator. You can see Microsoft says "configure and estimate the costs for Azure products." So let's search around and see what we can find in the Azure Calculator products. So you can start selecting the products you want to do the cost estimate for in some example scenarios saved estimates You can actually save the estimate that you have made, and you can even share it with your colleagues by sharing a unique URL for every estimate you make. Now, something worth mentioning: if you want to be able to save estimates, you shall have a Microsoft account, which is any one of the free Microsoft accounts, like your alpha email. Let's go back to the main review, which is the product review. Select a product to include it in your estimate. If you scroll down, you can search for a product. You can search for "virtual machines," "virtual machines can set," and so on. You can also search by category. So if I go to compute, I can select which one of the compute resources I want to do the estimate for—networking, storage, and so on. We have this list of categories, and this is the featured one. Let's scroll down more, and this is where, actually, you estimate the products that you will select are going to be. So let's go and select some of the products. Just for example, I'm not going to do an actual estimation for now. I just need you to know what this tool is and how to use it. Because in the next upcoming sections and in every course I present, I will actually explain how to do an estimation for a specific workload or for a specific tool of service. So I can explain to you the pricing of the products and of the designs as a whole as well. Let's say a product—for example, just a virtual machine. And I will also add the storage account notice that you can immediately view once you click on any of the products. So let me scroll down right now, and I can see your estimate. And this is the estimate you can actually expand, collapse, or even rearrange the order or delete everything. So let me collapse first. So these are the ones I have added—the virtual machine and the storage account. Now if you want to rearrange, you can do that. Click on Rearrange, and then you can just change the order of the products in any way. Let me keep it as it is. Something else you can do is change the titles of the products or of the estimates. So, for example, how about a demo estimate? And you can expand any one of them. You can select the specific settings and attributes of every product that you use for the virtual machine; for example, is it Windows or Linux? What is the size? Some of the other attributes, like "do you want to reserve the virtual machine"? You will get a great discount. Do you already have the licence with some restrictions? So you can also save money. We will explain this in one of the courses as well. So, just as with the managed discount, everything is the same for storage. So let me change the name of this virtual machine to, for example, App Saver—just any name; this is a custom name—and the storage, let's say App Saver Storage. You can, of course, delete or duplicate any one of those products. The things I wanted to show you are for support if you have purchased some kind of support plan from Microsoft. But I'll leave it as is and see what kind of pricing there is. I will also keep it to the Microsoft Online Service Agreement, which is the SRP price for Azure. You can change the currency. This is one of the important things I need to show you for US dollars, Euro, and so on. You have, like many others; let's keep it in the US. And you can save if you're already logged in using the Microsoft account; you can share again; you need to be logged in; and you can export. If you click on Export, you will have an Excel file with the estimate. Let me show you the file and how it looks. So this is the file. You can see the estimate name, the one I had in my inbox while I was doing the estimation: the virtual machine. Again, this is the custom name of the storage account, and this is the custom name I've used for the regions and the specifications you have selected. So you can actually review and share if you want an Excel file with the cost for the month or monthly cost, and for any upfront or something, you will need to pay in advance in case you use, for example, the reserved instances. So this is the tool, the Azure Calculator, which is used for the cost estimation. This is an important one and I need you to familiarise yourself with it, to play with it and to try to select products. This is something I'll ask you in the next exercise. So you actually know about the cost of the Azure products and designs. Because in real life, when you are working for a company, or if you are already working for a company and you want to be advanced in this Azure cloud experience area, you need to know about the cost as well. And this is something of courseI will teach in my courses.

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Azure Virtual Desktop Overview

1. What is Azure Virtual Desktop

Azure Windows Virtual Desktop. In this lecture, we will explain what the Azure WVD or Windows Virtual Desktop is, some of its features and characteristics, and we will see the look and feel of the Azure Windows Virtual Desktop. So what is the Azure Windows Virtual Desktop? Windows Virtual Desktop and Microsoft Azure are desktop and application virtualization services that run on the cloud. Windows Virtual Desktop works across many devices, like Windows, Mac, Android, Linux, and wherever you want. You can also access Windows Virtual Desktop hosted experiences using applications and the most recent browsers. So, what can Windows Virtual Desktop do for you? When you use the WVD on Azure, this is one of the things that you can do. First, you can virtualize both desktops and applications and provide them for your users. You can set up a multi-session Windows Ten deployment, which means you can have more than one user using the same Windows Ten virtual machines. So one virtual machine for many users has their own isolated experience. You can virtualize and optimise Microsoft 365 applications for enterprises and even provide Windows Seven Virtual Desktops with free extended security updates if needed for the organization. And you can bring your existing Remote Desktop Services and Windows Server desktops and applications to any computer. You can even migrate the Remote Desktop Services to the WVT. You can also manage Windows Ten, Windows Server, and Windows Seven desktops and applications with a unified management experience. So, before we jump into the characteristics and features of the WVD, let me give you the look and feel of the WVD on Azure. So this is the Azure Portal, and of course we will go into each and every detail throughout the course. But this is like the final result. So we have host pools, which are collections of machines, and in the host pools you can see the machines you have. For example, in this personal host pool, we have two session hosts, and if I go to the session host, I shall be able to see the session host I'm having in this host pool. Right now I have two session hosts. One of them has one active session, and they are assigned to different users because they are personal. So each one is only for one person or for one user. But if we were using the host pool, it's going to be different, as we are going to explain later in the course. So we have this setup; we have these machines so our users can actually use it using a remote desktop client, and we have many of them; we will explain them later. So they can have something like this—their own desktop experience. They can access it from anywhere, using any device. So this is what the WVD is about if we go back to our slides and continue with the experience and management features and characteristics. So when it comes to the experience and the management Windows Virtual Desktop supports full desktop remote apps. Also, you can connect to WVD with any device over the Internet. So you can connect from any device, anywhere. You can provide personal, persistent desktops. You can also provide non-persistent, dedicated, or multi-session experiences. So, for example, for personnel, you may want to provide personal remote desktops for members of an engineering team. And they would be able to add or remove programmes without impacting other users on the remote desktop. There is no need to manage the underlying server infrastructure because Microsoft Azure will take care of that for you. This is something we will discuss in detail in the coming lectures. And you can use a single image for many users. For production workloads, you can bring your own image or test from the Azure gallery. When it comes to enhanced security, WVD uses Azure Active Directory as the identity provider. This allows you to leverage additional security controls like multifactor authentication or conditional access. You can use reverse connect technology, and by doing so, you will be able to use the private virtual machine (IPS) and secure and pound ports only. So virtual machines in the Windows Virtual Desktop are not exposed to the Internet directly. They can be run using a private IP address and be isolated from other workloads or even the Internet. The reverse connect technology allows the VM to be accessed VM. If we use the reverse connect technology, which is used by the WVD, the VMs do not need any impound ports to be opened. Even the default RDP port doesn't have to be open. Instead, an agent creates an outbound connection using TCP to the Windows Virtual Desktop management plane. Azure will act as your reverse proxy for the RDB traffic. Also, the business data never leaves Azure. So with the Windows Virtual Desktop, the data and apps are separated from the local hardware and run instead on the remote server. So the risk of confidential data being left on a personal device is greatly reduced. So, when it comes to security, What about performance? Windows Virtual Desktop is a scalable service, so you can publish as many hospitals as you need to accommodate your diverse workloads. The applications remain close to the data because you can provision all of the resources in one region. User sign-in to the Windows Virtual Desktop is extremely fast because user profiles are containerized by using FSLogix technologies. At sign in, the user profile containeris dynamically attached to the computing environment. The user profile is immediately available and appears in the system exactly like a native user profile. And last but not least, the cost-efficiency of existing licences using Windows Virtual Desktop with a reduced charge Organizations with specific existing licences can now use Windows Virtual Desktop for free, aside from Azure Compute Storage and Network Usage billing. We go into details in the next lectures about the billing, the cost, and the licensing. If you buy one or three years as your reserve VMinstance, you will also save a great deal of money. You can buy the one or three year as your virtual machine instance to save up to 72%versus the pay as you go as Microsoft. This is, of course, subject to change at Microsoft as well. You can pay for reservations upfront or monthly, provide a billing discount, and not affect the runtime state of your resources. Also in the third point with Windows Tenmulti session you can reduce the cost because you are using polled multi session resources. With the new Windows Ten enterprise multi-session capability exclusive to Windows virtual desktop, you can greatly reduce the number of virtual machines and operating system overhead while still providing the same resources to your users. So this is what is the WVD about and it's features and the look and feel. In the coming lectures and sections, we will talk about details about the deployment, the design, the architecture, the deployment decisions, the identity, the network working, the sizing, the compute, the load balancing, and even have a project to deploy everything ourselves. See you in the following lectures. Bye.

2. Traditional VDI/RDS VS Azure Virtual Desktop

Before, we had the traditional Virtual Desktop Infrastructure and Remote Desktop Services offerings. And now we have the Azure Windows Virtual Desktop. So what is the difference between those two offerings, and what things do you need to know about each one of them? What is the nature of the infrastructure and the things you need to take care of for each of the offerings? So now we can see the traditional VDI, RDS, and the slide. As you can see in the slide, our infrastructure is a service offering. Which means if you want to go with those traditional offerings, you need to take care of the compute, storage, networking, licensing, and all the other things you can see in the slide, even the brokering and maintenance, the image management, and the type element. Now this is called "Infrastructure as a Service," and this is the way that the traditional VDI and RDS are working. Now, if we want to see the WVD, it is considered a "pass," which means platform as a service. So for the platform as a service, you only actually need to take care of the entitlement and the image management. So this is managed by you, all the rest is managed by Microsoft, and this is the Platform as a Service offering. You do not need to worry about infrastructure, licence assignment, maintenance, patching, updating, security patches, or gateway brokering. So actually using a bad service really enables you to create a repeatable desktop as a service; you don't need the in-depth technical knowledge that previous RDS and VDI offerings required. Infrastructure services, such as Gateway Brokering Licensing, are offered as a service in Azure. Now, once you use the WVD, there's no need to deploy and maintain any infrastructure. With Windows Virtual Desktop, you can manage the image and the virtual machines, and that's it. Not the infrastructure; you don't need to manage the Remote Desktop rules in the same way as the Remote Desktop Services. Again, just the virtual machines and who will be able to access them So for the image management, actually, this is something you can already use, like a preconfigured image from the Azure Marketplace, or you can customise your own image with your customised line of business applications for your employees. We will explore both in the project that we will do together. But for now, I need you to know and understand the difference between the traditional offerings and the new offering, the Windows Virtual Desktop offering. and this is actually what makes it great. So you only need to manage access and image management.

3. Azure Virtual Desktop Design and Architecture

How is the Windows virtual desktop design? How does it work? In this lecture, I will take you behind the scenes to understand the approach, design, and architecture of the Windows virtual desktop. We actually have three main blocks, as you can see. Starting from the left in the slide, we have the clients. This is the group of people who want to connect to their resources and desktops, virtual resources and desktops, or applications. They could use many different devices and many different clients to connect to the desktop and its resources. In the middle block, we have the control pane of the Windows virtual desktop, which includes many services that you don't need to take care of because they are provided for your platform as a service. Microsoft will take care of that, and I will explain in a little bit the user flow connection and how we interact with these services. And on the right side of the slide, which is the third block, are the Azure VMs, or the computing power, the horsepower behind the virtual desktops and applications that the user will access. And, of course, we have also got the active directory and the user profile. So now I want to focus a little bit on the Windows virtual desktop, the control panel, which is the block in the middle. And the job of this control plane is to orchestrate the creation and management of desktop and application session hosts, to authenticate the users your end users), and to determine where to land each user's desktop connection. This means it will decide what desktop virtual machine to patch the user through to. Now in the traditional RDS and VDI systems, especially the RDS world, this was handled through a number of RDS roles, and for the roles you had to have different virtual machines that you had to create, for example, the Remote Desktop licence server, the Remote Desktop Web, the Web client, the Remote Desktop Connection Broker, and even the gateway. Now with the WVD, it is no longer necessary to install and manage any of these roles, which means you will save actual money by eliminating these virtual machines because you no longer need them. Everything will be taken care of. This control plane is the Windows virtual desktop. So this is, in a nutshell, the design and architecture of the Windows virtual desktop resource from Microsoft Azure. Let me take you through the workflow. Once a user wants to connect to the assigned virtual desktops and applications, the first thing that will happen, if you can see the arrow and the orange, is that the agents within the virtual machines that act as decision hosts will interact with the WVD managed service and decision hosts, or the VMs will declare that they are active and ready for the new user connections. Then a user can actually launch his remote desktop client and connect to the Azure Active Directory. The user can sign in using the username and password. And the Azure Active Directory will return a security token, so the user can actually use the security token to pass through to the resources. What will happen next is that the remote desktop client of the user will present the token to the Web access service. So the broker service can then query the database to see what resources this user can access and what resources the user is actually authorised to use. Then the profile will present a list of the resources to the user. The user will then select the resource that he wants to access. Assuming, for example, that he chooses the virtual desktop, the full experience, and the remote desktop client connects to the gateway based on the user's selection. The broker service will then orchestrate the connection from the session host virtual machine or agent to the gateway once more. And the RDP traffic will now flow between the remote desktop client of the user and the session host virtual machine. And this is how the user will have a connection to his desktop and start working freely. So this is it in a nutshell as well. The connection workflow begins once a user asks for a resource and continues until the point where the resource is given to the user via the Azure Windows virtual desktop.

4. Azure Virtual Desktop Management

Windows Virtual Desktop Management In this lecture, we will discuss the things that you will need to take care of and manage yourself and the things that Microsoft will manage for you. and we will talk about that in a little bit more of details. In this diagram, you can see the things that are managed by Microsoft at the top and bottom of the diagram, so they will manage for you Web access, diagnostics, gateway management, brokers, and load balancing for your users. So whenever a user needs to make a connection or have a connection with a virtual desktop or resource, Microsoft will use these services behind the scenes. Also, of course, the Windows Virtual Desktop will need to use the infrastructure of Azure, which is also managed by Azure, like the compute, which means the VMs, storage, and networking you can use yourself, and the monitoring and security resources from Microsoft as well. What you will need to focus on and manage, and we will discuss this in detail in our next lecture, are the virtual machines, the master image, and the applications, along with, of course, the assignments like who can access what, so you'll need to configure the VMs and manage the users.

In the next slide, I will be focusing more and providing more details so you can have a full understanding of the things that Microsoft will do on your behalf behind the scenes and the things that you need to do. And I will start with the things that are managed by Microsoft. So this is what Microsoft manages for you. Windows Virtual Desktop provides virtualization infrastructure as a managed service. Windows Virtual Desktop manages the following for you. The first one is Web Access, the WebAccess service within the WVD, which means Windows Virtual Desktop lets users access the virtual desktops and remote apps just like they would with a local PC from anywhere and on any device. The second component that Microsoft also takes care of for you is the diagnostics. So there are more desktop diagnostics. It is an event-based aggregator that marks each user or administrator action on the Windows Virtual Desktop deployment as a success or failure. So you can later query the aggregation of events to identify failing components.

So this is also something that Microsoft will take care of for you. also the management. And by management, I mean that the WVD will give you the ability to manage the Windows Virtual Desktop configurations in the Azure portal so you can manage and publish the host pool resources moving to the broker, which is another service provided by the WVD, and that Microsoft will handle that for you behind the scenes. and the broker. Actually, it's a service that manages users' connections to the virtual desktops and remote applications. It offers load balancing as well as the ability to reconnect users to their previous sessions. So this is what the broker does for the load balancing session. Host load balancing is provided by this series. It provides "depth first" or "breath first" load balancing scenarios. We will talk more about the scenarios and about many other options of deployment in the coming lectures and sections. And the broker decides how new incoming sessions are to be distributed across the virtual machines in a host pool using the load balancing options. The last one is the gateway. The Remote Connection gateway service connects the remote users to the Windows Virtual Desktop, remote applications, and desktops from any internet-connected device that can run a Windows Virtual Desktop client. The client connects to a gateway, which then orchestrates the connection from the VM back to the same gateway. And of course the Windows Virtual Desktop uses the Azure Infrastructure Services for compute, storage, and networking. Now let's move on to the things that you will need to manage, and we can split them into two things: the desktops and remote apps and images and the management and policies. So let me start first with the desktop and remote applications, which are your responsibility.

You will be the one who will create the application groups to group, publish, and assign access to the remote applications and the desktops. So for the full desktop experience that you will provide for your users, you will be the one creating the Remote Desktop application groups, and to give users access to the full desktop, you can provide users with a desktop where the session host or virtual machine resources are shared or pulled for many users. Or you can provide a personal desktop to the user, which will allow them to be able to add or remove programmes without impacting other users. This is also related to the deployment options, which we will explore more than the applications. Because you also need to create the applications for your users, it is also your responsibility, and you will be the one creating the remote app application groups to provide users with access to the applications that you will individually publish to the application group.

You can create multiple remote application app groups to accommodate the different user scenarios, and you can use these application groups to virtualize an application that runs on a legacy operating system or one that needs secure access to corporate resources. As for the right side of the slide, which is the second part for which you are responsible and shall be the one to take care of, it is management and policies. There are different things that you will need to take care of. For example, the profile is the user profile. We have multiple choices and many technologies for the user profile. We will explore them in details as well in the deployment section, but I will go with the FS logix with a storage solution like Azure Files, for example, to containerize the user profiles and provide a fast and stateful experience for users. So it is your responsibility to select the technology and to have it ready and configured to be used by the users. You will also need to manage the sizing and scaling.

So it's your responsibility to select the VM size and how it scales, which is something we have specified and specialised a lecture for. And you need to make sure that you're using the proper host VM size, including GPU-enabled VMs if needed, and to specify what kind of load balancing method is to be used. Of course, as I told you in the previous slide, the load balancing is taken care of for you by Microsoft. Yes indeed. You don't need to create it or programme it or tell it how to work; you just need to select what is the preferred method for you based on some conditions or circumstances that you have, which we will also discuss in the deployment options section. Some of the other things you will need to take care of are, of course, the user management and the identity. So, how will you authenticate your users, and who will have access to which resources? Then there are the walking policies. So this is actually what you need to take care of, and this is what Microsoft will need to take care of. It's a platform for a service. It's an easy solution. You no longer need to take care of the brokering, the gateway, the access to all of these components, and so on. Microsoft will take care of them for you, and you'll just need to focus on the full list of experiences and applications you want to provide for your users.

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