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Azure VDI

This guide defines Azure VDI, covering its core benefits, architecture, common enterprise use cases, and key migration considerations for your business.

Carisa Stinger | June 18, 2025

Table of Contents

What is Azure VDI?

Azure VDI refers to Microsoft's cloud-native service, officially named Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD), which allows you to securely deliver a full Windows desktop experience and individual applications from the Azure cloud to your users on virtually any device. 

In essence, it modernizes traditional Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) by shifting the complexity of managing infrastructure to the cloud, giving your organization a flexible and scalable way to support remote work.

What business advantages does Azure VDI offer?

By delivering a Desktop as a Service (DaaS) solution, Azure VDI transforms how you manage user desktops, directly impacting your organization's financial, security, and operational posture. It moves desktop delivery from a capital-intensive, on-premises model to a flexible, cloud-based service.

How does it improve financial efficiency?

  • Shift from Capital to Operational Spending: You move from large, upfront hardware purchases (CapEx) to a predictable monthly subscription model (OpEx), paying only for the Azure resources you consume.
  • Cost Reduction with Multi-Session Windows: AVD provides exclusive multi-session capabilities for Windows 11 Enterprise, the modern operating system designed for hybrid work, allowing multiple users to share a single VM to significantly reduce compute costs.
  • Optimized Spending with Autoscaling: You can use built-in tools to automatically scale your VMs up or down based on usage. This ensures you aren't paying for idle capacity during off-peak hours, such as nights or weekends.

How does it enhance security and compliance?

  • Centralized Data Security: Because user desktops and data are stored in Azure, not on endpoint devices (laptops, personal PCs), the risk of data loss from a stolen or compromised device is dramatically reduced.
  • Advanced Security Integration: Azure VDI natively integrates with Azure's advanced security stack, allowing you to manage session hosts with Microsoft Intune to enforce security policies, use Conditional Access for granular control, and leverage Microsoft Defender for Cloud for threat detection.
  • Simplified Compliance: Centralizing your desktop environment in Azure's compliant datacenters can help you more easily meet industry-specific regulatory standards like HIPAA or PCI-DSS.

How does it increase operational agility and scalability?

  • Rapid Deployment: You can provision and deploy hundreds of desktops for your users in minutes or hours, not the weeks or months it can take to procure and set up physical hardware. This is ideal for scenarios like onboarding new employees, integrating teams after a merger, or bringing on temporary contractors.
  • Global Reach with a Local Feel: You can improve performance by deploying virtual desktops in Azure's global datacenters, and for workloads requiring data sovereignty or low latency, you can use Azure Local, which extends the AVD management plane to your on-premises datacenter via Azure Stack HCI.
  • Simplified IT Management: Microsoft manages the underlying AVD control plane, freeing your IT team from the operational burden of patching and maintaining the complex VDI infrastructure components required to deliver virtual desktops.

Know the TCO

This step-by-step wizard tool gives you the total cost of ownership for Windows 365 in your organization.

Know Your Cost

How does the Azure VDI architecture work?

The architecture is designed to separate the management infrastructure from the resources you control, simplifying deployment and maintenance. This hybrid approach gives you full control over your desktops while Microsoft handles the complex backend services.

What are the core components?

  • The AVD Control Plane: This is the "brain" of the service, and it's fully managed by Microsoft. It includes the Web Access portal, Gateway, Connection Broker, and diagnostics, all delivered as a service. You don't have to deploy or manage any of these components.
  • Host Pools: These are collections of Azure VMs that run your desktop operating systems and applications. You manage the VMs within a host pool, including the OS image, applications, and configuration.
    • Pooled: Multiple users share the VMs in the host pool. This is the most cost-effective option, ideal for general-purpose workloads.
    • Personal: Each user is assigned their own dedicated VM for full administrative control, which is best for power users or developers with specific needs.
  • Application Groups: These are logical groupings of applications installed on host pool VMs. You use application groups to publish either full desktops (Desktop Application Group) or individual applications (RemoteApp Application Group) to your users.
  • FSLogix Profile Containers: This technology is key to providing a seamless user experience in non-persistent, pooled environments. FSLogix attaches a user's profile (their data, settings, and configurations) from network storage to their session at sign-in, so their desktop always feels personal and consistent, no matter which VM they connect to.

How do users connect?

Users connect to their Azure VDI resources through a secure process called reverse connect. This means the session host VM initiates an outbound connection to the AVD control plane, so you don't need to open any inbound server ports, which significantly strengthens your security posture. Users can access their desktops and apps from nearly any device using:

  • The Windows Desktop client
  • The macOS client
  • Clients for iOS and Android
  • Any modern HTML5-capable web browser

What are the common enterprise use cases for Azure VDI?

The flexibility of Azure VDI allows it to solve a wide range of business challenges, making it a powerful tool for modernizing your end user computing strategy—the systems and services required to give employees secure and productive access to corporate resources. It is particularly effective in scenarios that require security, scalability, and support for a diverse workforce.

  • Enabling a secure hybrid and remote workforce: Provide a consistent and secure desktop experience to employees whether they are in the office, at home, or traveling, ensuring productivity without compromising on security.
  • Providing access for specialized workloads: Deliver high-performance, GPU-accelerated desktops for engineers using CAD software, financial analysts running complex models, or developers compiling large codebases.
  • Securing third-party and contractor access: Quickly provision and deprovision secure access to corporate applications and data for contractors, vendors, and temporary staff without issuing them a company-owned laptop.
  • Streamlining mergers and acquisitions (M&A): Onboard employees from an acquired company rapidly by giving them immediate access to a standardized corporate desktop environment, accelerating integration.
  • Supporting call centers and elastic workforces: Instantly scale desktop resources up to support seasonal demand (like retail holidays) or project-based work, and scale back down to control costs when the peak period is over.

How does Azure VDI compare to traditional on-premises VDI?

For organizations familiar with traditional VDI solutions from vendors like VMware or Citrix, understanding the differences with Azure VDI is key. Azure VDI represents a fundamental shift in how virtual desktops are deployed and managed.

Feature Traditional On-Premises VDI Azure VDI
Infrastructure You manage everything: physical servers, storage, networking, hypervisor, and the VDI control plane. Microsoft manages the entire control plane. You only manage the VMs, OS images, and applications.
Scalability Slow and capital-intensive. Requires purchasing and provisioning new physical hardware. Rapid and elastic. Scale up or down in minutes using the Azure cloud, paying only for what you use.
Cost Model Primarily Capital Expenditure (CapEx). Requires large upfront investment in hardware and software licenses. Primarily Operational Expenditure (OpEx). Pay-as-you-go model with predictable monthly costs.
Security You are responsible for securing the entire stack, from the physical datacenter to the endpoint. Shared responsibility model. Microsoft secures the underlying cloud and control plane; you secure your VMs and data.
User Experience Performance depends on the proximity of users to your datacenter. Can deploy resources in global Azure regions to reduce latency and improve performance for a distributed workforce.

Know the TCO

This step-by-step wizard tool gives you the total cost of ownership for Windows 365 in your organization.

Know Your Cost

What should you consider before migrating to Azure VDI?

A successful migration to Azure VDI requires careful planning. Addressing these key considerations upfront will ensure a smooth transition and help you realize the full benefits of the platform.

What are the licensing requirements?

The right to access Azure Virtual Desktop is included at no extra cost if you have eligible Microsoft 365 or Windows per-user enterprise licenses, which are also foundational for deploying Windows 365, Microsoft's service for delivering dedicated and personalized Cloud PCs. This is a significant cost advantage. You are still responsible for the Azure infrastructure costs (VMs, storage, networking) consumed by your deployment.

How do you handle user identities and profiles?

Your users need to be authenticated via an identity provider. AVD requires integration with Microsoft Entra ID, which can be synchronized with an existing on-premises Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) environment. You also need a strategy for user profiles, and using FSLogix with Azure Files or Azure NetApp Files is the standard best practice.

Are your applications compatible?

Most Windows applications work seamlessly on AVD. However, you should conduct an application assessment to identify any legacy or business-critical applications that may have specific dependencies or require testing to ensure they perform as expected in a virtualized, multi-session environment.

What are your network requirements?

Users need a reliable internet connection to access their virtual desktops. Additionally, your Azure environment needs a stable network connection back to any on-premises resources (like file servers or databases) that your virtual desktops might need to access. Services like Azure ExpressRoute or a Site-to-Site VPN are often used for this purpose.

How can Nerdio simplify Azure VDI management?

While Azure VDI provides a powerful and flexible platform, deploying, managing, and optimizing it at an enterprise scale introduces complexities. Nerdio Manager for Enterprise is a deployment, management, and optimization platform that sits on top of AVD to simplify every aspect of its lifecycle.

What challenges does Nerdio solve?

  • Deployment Complexity: Instead of navigating hundreds of settings in the Azure portal, Nerdio provides a simple, wizard-driven setup that can deploy a complete, production-ready AVD environment in just a few hours.
  • Ongoing Management: Nerdio provides a single, intuitive interface to automate and streamline routine IT tasks. This includes simplified image management, application deployment, user session monitoring, and host pool creation.
  • Advanced Cost Optimization: Nerdio’s sophisticated autoscaling technology goes far beyond native AVD capabilities. It uses predictive algorithms and fine-grained controls to precisely match your resources to user demand, often reducing Azure compute and storage costs by over 50%.
  • Bridging the Skills Gap: Nerdio empowers your existing IT team to effectively manage your entire AVD environment without requiring deep, specialized Azure expertise. The platform abstracts away the underlying complexity, turning difficult tasks into simple, point-and-click actions.

See this demo to learn how you can optimize processes, improve security, increase reliability, and save up to 70% on Microsoft Azure costs.

Optimize and save

See how you can optimize processes, improve security, increase reliability, and save up to 70% on Microsoft Azure costs.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Learn more about Azure VDI

About the author

Photo of Carisa Stinger

Carisa Stinger

Head of Product Marketing

Carisa Stringer is the Head of Product Marketing at Nerdio, where she leads the strategy and execution of go-to-market plans for the company’s enterprise and managed service provider solutions. She joined Nerdio in 2025, bringing 20+ years of experience in end user computing, desktops-as-a-service, and Microsoft technologies. Prior to her current role, Carisa held key product marketing positions at Citrix and Anthology, where she contributed to innovative go-to-market initiatives. Her career reflects a strong track record in driving growth and adoption in the enterprise technology sector. Carisa holds a Bachelor of Science in Industrial Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology.

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