Two weeks ago, the 30th edition of the Experts 2 Experts Virtualization Conference (E2EVC) took place in Leopardstown, Dublin. A great community driven conference, founded by Alex Cooper. If you’re not familiar with the event check out e2evc.com for more details.
Last month BriForum 2016 Europe took place in London. Also a great, vendor independent conference founded by Brian Madden. For more information on that event check out briforum.com.
At both events, we (Freek Berson & Benny Tritsch) presented a session on Azure RemoteApp. Our session was called “Azure RemoteApp – Past, Present & future”, the more important subtitle however was “Let’s talk ARA Use Cases!”
During these sessions we not only presented all of the awesome stuff of Azure RemoteApp but also covered the best practices, current limitations and pitfalls you need to be aware. Basically we tried to answer the question “What does it really mean to take an Azure RemoteApp Collection into production?”. We covered various use cases & scenarios and shared many of our experiences from the field.
Over the past 2 weeks we have received a lot of requests from people who were not able to attend these conferences, asking if we we’re going to share our slide deck. Although about half of our session was a live demo, we would like to share the contents of the deck and elaborate some more on the key areas of our sessions in this blog post! You can find a download link at the end of this blog post.
THE FIRST SCENARIO we cover is the administrator scenario. Basically we answer the questions, “If I’m an administrator dealing with Azure RemoteApp on a daily basis, will my life become easier?” and “What is the admin experience like?” We cover the Azure Portal, and show a demo of PowerShell scripts syncing members from an Active Directory Group towards Azure RemoteApp, and publishing new applications using PowerShell. We talk about the Application Life Cycle Management for Azure RemoteApp and how we advise to move applications away from the Template Image as much as possible using e.g. App-V, FSLogix or Unidesk. We also touch on Adaptive Scaling, the mechanism that Azure RemoteApp uses to, based on the past few days, predict the usage and size the number RD Session Hosts accordingly.
THE SECOND SCENARIO we cover is the end user experience. If I’m an end user consuming Azure RemoteApp, what does it mean for me? We discuss and show the various options to connect to Azure RemoteApp. We demo the Azure RemoteApp client which is available for Windows, iOS, MacOS and Android. We talk about how the Windows client is a Click Once application which also allows you to place shortcuts in the local start menu. We explain that for iOS, MacOS and Android this is an App from the various Appstores. We also demo the recently released HTML5 client and talk about how it allows client-less access to Azure RemoteApp and enables Linux clients. We also briefly touch on new Universal Windows App, currently into preview, and explain how it allows access to both on premises RDS and Azure RemoteApp and enables scenarios like Windows 10 Phone Continuum.
THE THIRD SCENARIO is all about discussing real life use cases. For two use cases we describe the scenario based on number of users, number of applications, types of clients et cetera. We then cover what it would mean to implement Azure RemoteApp in those scenarios and explain why we think Azure RemoteApp could be a viable option or not and discuss this with the audience. We also elaborate on the full list Azure RemoteApp current limitations.
We finish the session by covering the road map of Azure RemoteApp. Amongst other features we talk about the great new UPD Management PowerShell CmdLets recently added, UDP support, ARM support and a fix for the UPN mismatch issue.
To conclude our session, we explain that we think Azure RemoteApp is a great turnkey solution and that it’s a true “as a service offering” that can be implemented without a large capital expense. When considering Azure RemoteApp however, we advise the audience to take a close look at the specific scenario and use case.
We thank everyone who attended our session in both London and Dublin, we appreciate the interaction, questions and great feedback!
Download the full slide deck here: Azure RemoteApp Past, Present & Future – Slide Deck
