Exciting times here at Nerdio. Last week we officially released the public preview of Nerdio Manager for MSP, or NMM for short. In this blog series I would like to share with you the reason behind this solution and talk a bit more about the multi-tenant management capabilities it has to offer. Managing and optimizing Azure Virtual Desktop combined with Azure IaaS virtual machines, as well as various native Azure services, has never been easier.

Nerdio Manager for MSP is a brand new and one of a kind multi-tenant Azure Virtual Desktop and Azure IaaS management solution. Designed from the ground-up while leveraging some of the most powerful features and functionalities you have come to know from Nerdio for Azure (NFA) and Nerdio Manager for Enterprise (NME).

No Easy Task

Managing, fine tuning, and optimizing AVD deployments is no easy task – no matter how good your PowerShell and/or DevOps automation skills are, as I am sure many of you have found out by now. Never mind the risk it brings and the time it consumes. That’s one of the main reasons why Nerdio Manager for Enterprise has been a hit from day one.

Thousands of companies are running and managing tens of thousands of virtual machines, applications, images, and even more users on daily basis — with ease, I might add. The word spreads fast.

Given its split-tenant architecture – NME is deployed within the primary Azure AD tenant of the customer, meaning a dedicated NME installation per tenant – and it being deployed through the Azure marketplace make that NME is secure by design and offers a ton of flexibility.

Flexibility when it comes to standing up entire AVD environments within 60 minutes or less, for example, by onboarding existing AVD deployment within minutes after NME has been installed, but also from a development perspective – it’s no coincidence that we come out with new versions of our software on a monthly basis, sometimes even twice a month.

The Challenge

While the above approach is a perfect fit for Enterprise type companies; for Managed Service Providers (MSPs), this is a different story.

Personally, I have worked with multiple MSPs throughout 2020, implementing Nerdio Manager for Enterprise for their customers, organizing training sessions, building an Azure Cloud practice helping them to better support their end-customers, and so on.

However, installing and setting up multiple, sometimes dozens of NME environments (MSPs easily have dozens, if not hundreds of clients), again, one per tenant can be a handful. Not to mention managing the various accounts needed to log into the various customer environments and go about your daily business – enter Nerdio Manager for MSP.

Introducing Nerdio Manager for MSP

Nerdio Manager for MSP offers a unique mix of extreme power, unique AVD management and autoscale capabilities (for AVD as well as IaaS), combined with different forms of automation, auto deployment options, native Azure integrations, and a pallet of user, IaaS virtual machine, security, and Microsoft 365 management options.

The best thing is, NMM is multi-tenant.

Meaning, as an MSP, you can onboard as many customers as you want while still being able to get to all of them through a single mouse-click once logged in (you only need to log in once) to the main management console.

It brings together the best of both worlds.

Implementing NMM is easy and happens fully automated via the Azure marketplace, however, we offer multiple customer deployment scenario’s, here’s a high-level overview of what’s possible:

• Greenfield – no Azure footprint whatsoever. Up and running in 60 minutes.
• Landing zone only – existing AD or AADDS. Up and running in 30 minutes.
• Existing IaaS – existing Azure environment. Up and running in 10 minutes.
• Existing WVD – existing AVD deployment. Up and running in 10 minutes.

Because of its architecture (similar to Nerdio Manager for Enterprise, though multi-tenant, we’ll spend more time on that in part two of this series) it offers the same flexibility and extensibility as Nerdio Manager for Enterprise. Enabling us to innovate at a rapid pace and come out with new versions of NMM quickly adding even more features and functionalities.

Our roadmap for 2021 is ambitious, to say the least.  

Networking, backups, disk management, shadowing users, Azure Files, Role Based Access, MSIX App Attach, and more — it is all in there.

In short you will not find a more complete, efficient, and easier to use WVD and IaaS management platform out there.

In part two of this series, we will have a more detailed look the NMM architecture, the underlying resources, and deployment options. Stay tuned, there is much more to share!

Thank you for reading.

Bas van Kaam

Nerdio Field CTO, EMEA