AVD Host Pool - An Overview

Host pools are a collection of one or more identical virtual machines (VMs) within Azure Virtual Desktop environments. Each host pool can contain an app group that users can interact with as they would on a physical desktop. You control the resources published to users through app groups.

All session host virtual machines in a host pool should be sourced from the same image for a consistent user experience.

A host pool can be one of two types:

• Personal, where each session host is assigned to individual users.

• Pooled, where session hosts can accept connections from any user authorized to an app group within the host pool.

You can set additional properties on a pooled host pool to change its load-balancing behavior, how many sessions each session host can take, and what the user can do to session hosts in the host pool while signed in to their Azure Virtual Desktop sessions.

You can also configure the size of each VM in the host pool depending upon the workload of the VMs.

One of the key factors influencing user experience with an AVD service is the performance of the host pools. Host pool performance largely rests on the session load on the VMs in the pool, and whether/not the VMs are sized commensurate to their load. An under-sized VM will often run into resource crunches, causing applications on the VM to slow down or be unresponsive. Since the applications on a single VM can be used by multiple users, poor VM performance will result in many unhappy users. To avoid this, administrators must continuously monitor the user activity on each VM in a pool to assess its load, and also measure resource usage on every VM to understand if the VMs have enough resource capacity to service the load. These insights will help administrators tweak the load-balancing configuration and resource allocations of VMs, so that user complaints related to desktop/application slowness reduce and user satisfaction with the AVD service increases. eG Enterprise is capable of providing such useful insights on AVD host pool performance to administrators!