r/AzureVirtualDesktop

Azure Virtual Desktop Session Host Configuration introduces a modern way to deploy and manage session hosts by defining their configuration directly within the Host Pool. Instead of manually provisioning virtual machines and configuring them individually, Session Host Configuration enables a standardized and automated deployment experience. This helps ensure that every session host is deployed with the same settings, image, networking, identity, and security configuration, making Azure Virtual Desktop environments easier to manage at scale. In this blog, we will explore how to automate the deployment of Azure Virtual Desktop by using the new Session Host Configuration feature together with Azure Bicep.

We have a host pool for users to run a certain application and we don’t want any of them to use outlook on those AVDs, I logged in as a domain admin and uninstalled it from apps in settings but it looks like it does not uninstall it for the other users

Anyone knows how to get it removed completely from everyone ?

Hi all,

Since we've transitioned from using the Remote Desktop app to Windows App to access AVD, we've seen nothing but problems and severe limitations. These are described below. Is all hope lost ? Microsoft clearly know about these issues and don't care. The word is they have no intention of backtracking on their awful decision to deprecate the Remote Desktop app. Windows App has been out for nearly 3 years. In my experience, this means it's now 'mature' and therefore these problems and bugs will not be fixed. What should we all do ? Any thoughts ?

1. Extremely poor reliability. For example, using Windows App to access our RDP jumpbox workspace, where we then run MSTSC.exe to jump onto on-prem servers remotely. Individual sessions randomly freeze with no errors logged or displayed. The individual server connection needs to be terminated and started again. Happens many times a day for our users. This started with the adoption of Windows App and got much worse with Microsoft's December and January Latest Cumulative Updates (LCUs) to Windows. These updates 'changed' RDP protocol handling (i.e., broke it).
2. Windows App does not support multiple connections / app instances to the same AVD workspace. If I want to connect to 5 different servers by running MSTSC.exe 5 times concurrently in the same AVD workspace session, using one Windows App session, I can't. Windows App doesn't support multiple published application sessions. So I have to open Windows App 5 times. This causes the already terrible performance and reliability to be even worse.
3. Abysmal performance. The software latency is wild. Typing feels like the server you're connected to is on the moon. Plus, Microsoft's operating system and software is so poorly implemented that it can't handle the keyboard buffer correctly with this latency and characters entered on the keyboard get substituted (out of order) and dropped regularly. You'll notice I said 'software latency' not network latency. That's because network latency from our remote PCs to Internet hosts is absolutely fine. The latency is in fact coming from Microsoft's own systems, and didn't occur when using the Remote Desktop app.

All this happens regardless of user's device hardware or network, and regardless of what target server we're connecting to, what version of Windows it's running, whether it's virtual or physical and, if physical, what physical hardware it's running.

I deployed a new AVD setup for client with Entra joined session hosts with a golden image created from Win11 25H2 EMS.

The weird thing is PowerShell doesn't work. I mean it launches but I cannot type anything in it.
PowerShell ISE and CMD works fine though.

What could be the reason ?

I’m currently working on deploying a Windows OpenGL desktop application using AVD as the primary delivery method. The issue I’m running into is very poor performance, even on a high-spec NV instance NV36ads A10 v5 with a powerful GPU and 36 vCPUs.

I’ve tried several troubleshooting steps, but it seems that uninstalling or disabling the NVIDIA GPU makes little to no difference in overall performance. Is there any additional configuration required?

I’ve already enabled all relevant Group Policies for hardware acceleration and Remote Desktop session encoding, and the GPU driver appears to be properly installed and configured.

At this point, I’m not sure where else to look. Any guidance would be appreciated.

Here is a screen shot of the the system information during a remote desktop session:

https://imgur.com/a/vTbdFMo

Note: I have disabled the hyper-V driver to force the system to use the Nvidia GPU.

Hello, Could someone help me to shine some light on a problem we are having with AVD andO365. Currently the AVD systems are Hybrid joined to on-prem domain as well as to Azure. Our users can log in fine to the OS, however when they go to open an office app, they get a message that that they need to log in, which is time consuming. Digging deeper we see a message about a grace period expired.

We have been working with a Microsoft rep and have exhausted all options. My next step was to open a ticket with support, and that usually never goes anywhere.

here is what we have done:

used FSLogix and applied the office settings. that did not work.

Applied the shared office settings, that didn't work either.

we also removed office and reinstalled using the shared license setting, still did not work.

we also, removed O365 and installed the KMS version. Office worked, however onedrive still prompted for a login.

Any help would be appreciated.

Does anyone have issues with user's host pools not loading in the WindowsApp when it's not running as Administrator?

We've recently been having a small influx of users report this issue. Initial attempt to connect to a pool will spin for 2-3 minutes and then fail. After running the WindowsApp as admin, users connect as expected within seconds. This is affecting a very small subset of our users so we're able to direct them to running as Admin, but we're also trying to get ahead of this and figure out if we can change something on a broader scale to resolve/prevent the issue for any new users that may have this issue.

Hi all,

We need to move our 25 AVD session hosts from West Europe to Sweden Central because of capacity issues. The plan is to keep the FSLogix profile storage in West Europe.

Latency between the regions is around 25 to 35ms. I know FSLogix is sensitive to network latency. Will this cause major issues like slow logins or black screens?

Can Cloud Cache handle this or does storage absolutely need to be in the same region as the hosts?

Appreciate any advice!

Since Windows 11 25H2 multisession, I've been unable to type in either Command Prompt or PowerShell consoles. I've been typing in Notepad, copying, and pasting, although the backspace, enter, and up/down arrow keys work fine. Old golden images work just fine, but Azure Marketplace images (across 18 different VMs) are always broken.

After days of working like this, I suddenly realizing that opening the Run dialog and running cmd.exe -c "start cmd.exe" spawns a perfectly-working console. Spawning a new one from that results in another broken one.

Surely this isn't just my tenant. Is anyone else experiencing this with Windows 11 25H2 multisession Azure Marketplace images?

I'm deploying Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) session hosts using Terraform, but I can't get the session hosts to auto enroll in Intune.

The Azure AD (Entra ID) extension is configured correctly, and the VMs are successfully joining Entra ID. However, the MDM field shows "None" in Entra, even though I've enabled automatic Intune enrollment for all users and all Windows devices.

This is in Azure Government, and I've updated all the enrollment-related URLs/TLDs to use .us where applicable (MDM Terms of Use, MDM Discovery, MDM Compliance, and WIP Discovery).

From my research, the only requirements seem to be:

- System-assigned managed identity enabled on the VM

- Azure AD login/Entra join extension configured

I'm also running terraform apply using my own account, which has both Contributor and Intune Administrator roles.

Has anyone run into this issue in Azure Gov? If so, what was the root cause and how did you resolve it?

Note - event viewer isnt showing much on the vm

Any troubleshooting tips would be appreciated.

What are the correct keys or policy's required for the local default client to redirect through every time?

Hi all,

I’m seeing an issue in our AVD environment that started around a month ago.

Some users report that in the morning they cannot connect to their session hosts.

Current observations:

• Session host VMs are hibernated overnight
• In the Azure portal, the VM shows as running normally after startup
• However, in the AVD host pool, the session host is marked as Unavailable
• The VM Agent appears to be not running

As a result, users are unable to connect.

Temporary workaround:

• If I stop and start the VM, the issue is resolved and the session host becomes available again

This seems to happen consistently after the overnight hibernation cycle.

Has anyone experienced a similar issue ?

We have a few thousand D4SV5 AVDs with hibernation currently in production that we've been using since late 2024.

Since around April we've been getting a bunch of users calling into our Help Desk unable to connect and a simple stop start fixes it.

Pulled some data and besides for allocation issues (spread out through all subscriptions) we have a bunch of users getting RDS unhealthy errors.

Exported all of Event Viewer for a host (all users have personal hosts) and found that the logs are empty from around 5AM until 9AM (service desk did the stop start around then) when it showed that the last shutdown was unexpected with no crash files. We also have other monitoring agents on these hosts and they showed nothing.

However according to Azure, it started up at 6AM (scaling plan wake up), reported accelerated networking issues (required for some reason on a D4SV5) at 6:28AM and the user got the RDS error at 8:32AM.

Most notably, in the performance charts on Azure it shows from 6AM to 9AM the CPU spiked at 100% as the first data point until the end with absolutely no network or disk traffic or use.

Azure VM Team is insistent that this is a Guest OS problem.

How is that possible?

From all my years of Windows and VM experience that seems like a Hypervisor that assigned CPU but couldn't assign memory or disk.

I am delivering an application through Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) to external users who have their own Microsoft Entra tenants. These users are working from their office machines and sign into Windows using their own Entra accounts.

After logging in, they launch our application using a link in the following format:

ms-avd:connect?workspaceId=<workspace-id>&resourceid=<resource-id>&username=<email>&version=0

The issue I’m facing is that, after a fresh Windows sign-in, launching the app via this URL causes Windows App to select the wrong tenant. As a result, the connection fails and the application does not launch.

This can be temporarily resolved by opening Windows App manually, signing out, clearing saved credentials, and then signing back in using our tenant. After that, the URL works correctly.

However, this process is cumbersome and must be repeated after every Windows sign-in. Are there any supported ways to force or reliably control the tenant selection for ms-avd:connect so that it consistently uses the correct Entra tenant?

Hey guys,

I’m creating new redirection exclusion list for our environment since the profiles are just growing rapidly because of cache and the biggest one is teams cache.

Can’t seem to find a solid exclusion list for new teams that does not break anything when it’s applied.

Does anyone have one ?