WVD and VDS v5.5 Prerequisites

Required: An Azure tenant and Azure Active Directory

WVD activation in Azure is a tenant-wide setting. VDS supports running one WVD instance per tenant.

Required: An Azure subscription (note the subscription ID that you want to use)

All the deployed Azure resources should be setup in one dedicated subscription. This makes cost tracking for WVD much easier and simplifies the deployment process.
NOTE: Azure free trials are not supported as they do not have enough credits to deploy a functional WVD deployment.

Enough quota for the VM families you will use - specifically at least 10 cores of the Ds v3 family for the initial platform deployment (as few as 2 cores can be used, but 10 covers every initial deployment possibility).

Required: An Azure global administrator account.

The VDS setup wizard requests that the Azure admin grant delegated permissions to the VDS service principal and install the VDS Azure Enterprise application. The admin must have the following Azure roles assigned:

Required: An Azure image that supports multi-session Windows 10.

The Azure Marketplace provides the most recent versions of their base Windows 10 image and all Azure subscriptions have access to those automatically. If you want to use a different image or a custom image, want the VDS team to provide advice about creating or modifying other images or have general questions about Azure images let us know and we can schedule a conversation.

WVD requires that the user identity be a part of Azure AD and that the VMs are joined to an Active Directory domain that is synced with that same Azure AD instance. VMs cannot be attached directly to the Azure AD instance so a domain controller needs to be configured and in-sync with Azure AD.

In WVD the storage strategy is designed so that no persistent user/company data resides on the WVD session VMs. Persistent data for user profiles, user files and folders, and corporate/application data are hosted on one or more data volume(s) hosted on an independent data layer.

FSLogix is a profile containerization technology that solves many user profile issues (like data sprawl and slow logins) by mounting a user profile container (VHD or VHDX format) to the session host at session initialization.

Due to this architecture a data storage function is required. This function must be able to handle the data transfer required each morning/afternoon when a significant portion of the users login/logoff at the same time. Even moderately sized environments can have significant data transfer requirements. The disk performance of the data storage layer is one of the primary end user performance variables and special care must be taken to appropriately size the performance of this storage, not just the amount of storage. Generally, the storage layer should be sized to support 5-15 IOPS per user.

Required: An inventory of all existing network subnets including any subnets visible to the Azure subscription via an Azure Express Route or VPN. The deployment needs to avoid overlapping subnets.

The VDS setup wizard allows you to define the network scope in case there is a range that is required, or must be avoided, as part of the planned integration with existing networks.

Determine an IP range to user during your deployment. Per Azure best practices, only IP addresses in a private range are supported.

Some of the unique capabilities of VDS such as the cost saving Workload Scheduling and Live Scaling functionality require an administrative presence within the tenant and subscription. Therefore, an administrative VM called CWMGR1 is deployed as part of the VDS setup wizard automation. In addition to VDS automation tasks this VM also holds VDS configuration in a SQL express database, local log files and an advanced configuration utility called DCConfig.

Decide which Azure region or regions will host your WVD Virtual Machines. Note that Azure NetApp Files and certain VM families (GPU enabled VMs, for example) have a defined Azure region support list while WVD is available in most regions.

Decide which Active Directory type you want to use:

Decide where the data for user profiles, individual files, and corporate shares will be placed. Choices include:

Administrators must provide a Domain Administrator credential at some point in the deployment process. A temporary Domain Administrator credential can be created, used and deleted later (once the deployment process completes).
Alternatively, customers who require assistance in building out the pre-requisites can leverage the Domain Preparation Tool.