Windows 10: Windows Virtual Desktop is now generally available worldwide

Brink · Sep 30, 2019

Today, we’re excited to announce that Windows Virtual Desktop is now generally available worldwide. Windows Virtual Desktop is the only service that delivers simplified management, a multi-session Windows 10 experience, optimizations for Office 365 ProPlus, and support for Windows Server Remote Desktop Services (RDS) desktops and apps. With Windows Virtual Desktop, you can deploy and scale your Windows desktops and apps on Azure in minutes.

Since we announced Windows Virtual Desktop last September, and through the public preview announced in March, thousands of customers have piloted the service and taken advantage of the Windows 10 multi-session capability—validating the importance of this feature as a core part of the service. Customers also represented, all major industries and geographies, helping us get feedback from different customer types and locations. As a result, as of today the service is now available in all geographies. In addition, the Windows Virtual Desktop client is available across Windows, Android, Mac, iOS, and HTML 5.
“Windows Virtual Desktop allows our employees to work in a secure manner wherever they are. Windows Virtual Desktop provides the Windows 10 desktop experience that our employees are familiar with across a variety of devices or web browsers.”
—Jake Hovermale, Chief Technical Officer, BEI Networks
With the end of extended support for Windows 7 coming in January 2020, we also understand some customers need to continue to support Windows 7 legacy applications as they migrate to Windows 10. To support this need, you can use Windows Virtual Desktop to virtualize Windows 7 desktops with free Extended Security Updates (ESU) until January 2023. If you’re in the process of migrating to Windows 10 and need app compatibility assistance, read more about how we can help with the Desktop App Assure program.

To help increase productivity, we invested heavily in the Office experience in a virtualized environment with native improvements, as well as through the acquisition of FSLogix. In July, we made the FSLogix technology available to Microsoft 365, Windows 10 Enterprise, and RDS customers. Today, all FSLogix tools are fully integrated into Windows Virtual Desktop, enabling you to have the smoothest, most performant Office virtualization experience available today.

In addition to the significant architectural improvements for deployment and management, we’re also simplifying app delivery by supporting MSIX packaged apps to be dynamically “attached” to a virtual machine instead of installing it permanently. This is important because it significantly decreases storage and makes it easier for the admin to manage and update the apps, while creating a seamless experience for the user.

Check out the new video from Scott Manchester, Principal Engineering Lead for Windows Virtual Desktop, where he does a great job of walking you through the app “attach” experience.

Microsoft Mechanics

Windows Virtual Desktop is now released and ready for production!
Watch the video

[youtube]QLDu6QVohEI[/youtube]

Extending Windows Virtual Desktop

We also worked closely with our partner ecosystem to help our customers extend Windows Virtual Desktop and get the most out of existing virtualization investments.

Starting today, Citrix can extend Windows Virtual Desktop worldwide, including support for Windows 10 multi-session, Windows 7 with free Extended Security Updates for up to three years, and support for Windows Server 2008 R2 with free Extended Security Updates on Azure.

Later this year, VMware Horizon Cloud on Microsoft Azure will extend Windows Virtual Desktop and its benefits, such as Windows 10 Enterprise multi-session and support for Windows 7 with free Extended Security Updates for up to three years. Preview will be available by the end of the calendar year.

We also engaged with hardware partners, system integrators (SI), who provide turnkey desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) offerings, and value-added solution providers, who add capabilities such as printing, application layering, assessment, and monitoring on Azure Marketplace. Learn more about Windows Virtual Desktop partners on the documentation page.

General availability of Windows Virtual Desktop is just the beginning. We’ll continue to rapidly innovate and invest in desktop and app virtualization. We look forward to sharing more with you in the coming months. In the meantime, learn more on our product page and get started with Windows Virtual Desktop today.

If you’re a partner and want to learn more about Windows Virtual Desktop, visit the Azure Partner Zone page for Windows Virtual Desktop.
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Source: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/micr...ble-worldwide/

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Brink · Sep 30, 2019

Remote Desktop Services 2019 generally available Windows Server 2019

We released the newest version of Remote Desktop Services (RDS), RDS 2019, on October 2, 2018. RDS 2019 builds on the strong foundation of RDS 2016, letting you rapidly deploy on-premises or in the cloud. RDS 2019 is generally available with Windows Server 2019.

RDS 2019 will give customers the opportunity to leverage fantastic enhancements that make it the optimal version of RDS, to date, with several areas of innovation to improve the administrative and client experiences.

We brought innovation centered around three areas in RDS 2019 – Simplify IT management, User experience, and Improved security.

Simplify IT management

We have time and again heard from customers that license management should focus on simplification to scale deployments. Over the past few years, we have focused on improving management of Remote Desktop (RD) Licensing servers and entitlement through Active Directory (AD).

Now, you will be able to leverage high availability RD Licensing servers with forward-compatibility for future versions of Windows Server to enable easier management of licenses from a variety of RDS releases.

We have also made it easier to manage licenses for your employees by bringing the ability for the RD Licensing servers to update RDS user Client Access Licenses (CALs) into AD objects without accessing AD directly.

Lastly, we added perfmon (Performance Counters) APIs to provide partners an easy way to access data to build monitoring dashboards and deliver a consistent user experience.

User experience

We have also invested in providing an enhanced user experience where end users will be able to leverage desktops and apps through RDS 2019 to maximize productivity.

To start, we have added modern notifications for RemoteApp in the Action Center to improve productivity with applications like Microsoft Outlook.

We have improved upon innovations in Discrete Device Assignment in RDS 2016 to bring better security, virtual machine (VM) isolation, and performance for your graphic-intensive workloads. These improvements in GPU virtualization technologies will result in reduced network traffic and smooth video playback.

In addition to the GPU virtualization technology, we added high-level redirection of built-in or attached video cameras to deliver optimized video stream at higher frame rates in new and legacy remote applications and desktops. Users can now have a better experience with video-intensive interactions.

Lastly, we have reduced CPU usage on the client and server and bandwidth with better image quality to bring a faster end-to-end web client experience.

Security

One of our primary goals as the Remote Desktop Services product team is to help improve your security posture for your desktop and app virtualization environments. We have improved security through several enhancements.

With Windows Admin Center integration, it is easy to consolidate all local and remote server management into a single pane.

We have brought several Windows Defender optimizations for multi-session to give you more confidence in bringing a secure, scalable and cost-effective desktop experience to end users.

We also added web client support for Single Sign-on (SSO) to deliver a streamlined authentication experience for users connecting via the web client.

A few additional features include easy-to-configure DTLS-based encryption, all of which, work toward providing a trusted end-to-end RDS deployment.

Deploying RDS 2019 on Azure

We recognize that giving you the ability and making it easier to deploy RDS on Azure gives you a lot of flexibility, scalability, security and several other advantages of Azure. To improve flexibility and ease of cloud adoption, we also support hybrid deployments where the infrastructure roles can be in Azure while the host Virtual Machines (VMs) can be on-premises.

Key enhancements for deploying RDS 2019 on Azure include using Azure Key Vault for simplified certificate management and using Azure SQL DB for the RD licensing high-availability feature.

Lastly, later in October we will announce the availability of Remote Desktop Services (RDS) subscriptions through the Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) program. The availability of RDS in CSP addresses customer needs for additional cost-effective solutions that support desktop and app virtualization.

With RDS Subscriptions, partners can directly sell RDS subscriptions through our CSP program, eliminating the extra step of customers and partners acquiring different licenses through various programs. With this model, customers can enjoy a faster licensing cycle due to CSP integration with other Microsoft licenses including Windows Server, SQL Server, and Office to make it easy for partners to simplify the buying process.

For more technical information on RDS 2019, please refer to the RDS documentation page.
Download Windows Server 2019 that includes RDS 2019 now.

Frequently asked questions

Q: When will I be able to download the final version of Windows Server 2019?
A: Windows Server 2019 that includes RDS 2019 became generally available on October 2, 2018. It is available for evaluation and download through Volume Licensing Service Center (VLSC).

Q: Is Remote Desktop Server included in Windows Server 2019?
A: Yes. Remote Desktop Server 2019 will be a server role in Windows Server 2019.

Q: How do we view this announcement with Windows Virtual Desktop announcement at Ignite?
A: This is the most up-to-date version of RDS to enable running the latest on-premises multi-session virtualization available with Windows Server. Windows Virtual Desktop is a desktop and application virtualization service on Azure. Read the blog post Microsoft 365 adds modern desktop on Azure for more information.

Q: How is RDS on Azure different from Windows Virtual Desktop?
A: RDS is the ideal on-premises desktop and application virtualization solution, with a Windows Server operating system to provide a multi-session desktop experience. When deployed on Azure, you can scale your deployment and manage RD infrastructure roles in your own subscription. Windows Virtual Desktop enables customers to deliver a brand-new multi-session capability with a full Windows 10 experience, with the scale and flexibility of Azure. With this new service, Microsoft manages the infrastructure roles. Windows Virtual Desktop will be available for public preview later this calendar year. For more information, please visit the product page.

Q: Will there be a path to go from RDS to Windows Virtual Desktop?
A: Yes, we are developing Azure documentation guidance for this migration path as Windows Virtual Desktop gets closer to public preview later in calendar year 2018.
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Source: Remote Desktop Services 2019 generally available with Windows Server 2019 - Windows Server Blog

sirBait · Sep 30, 2019

Virtual desktops

Hello ,

Thank you for the update on the issue.

If issue still persists, I would suggest you to refer the blog and article mentioned below and see if it helps.

Virtual Desktops in Windows 10 – The Power of Windows…Multiplied

Multiple desktops in Windows 10

Hope the information provided is helpful. Do let us know if you have any more concern related to Windows. We will be more than happy to assist you.

Regards,
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In the article you linked it says talks about 4 goals Microsoft has with virtual desktops:

Give you more desktop space to group related windows

Help you quickly locate and switch to any window or group of windows

Let you easily re-organize your groups and move windows as tasks evolve

Keep you in control of the degree of separation between your grouped windows

Not being able to control what desktop the program opens on really doesn't fit in with these goals.

Give me one good reason for why it is suppose force me to change virtual desktop when I open a program, just one good reason and I will consider to drop the issue. To me this sounds like virtual desktops isn't ready yet and you refuse to acknowledge that
there are bugs, because this makes it very hard to work with multiply virtual desktops.

Darleen Pen · Sep 30, 2019

Virtual Desktops Windows 10?

Hi Lucas,

Modifying the settings of a virtual desktop requires complex steps. Because of this, we might need to refer you to our Microsoft TechNet forums for further assistance. For us to direct you to the correct forum category, we would need the answers to the following:

Are you using a Windows Server?

Is your device connected to a domain network?

What virtual desktop are you using?

If you are using Hyper-V, you can use this article published
by Andre Da Costa as your reference on how to use Windows 10's built in Hyper-V for creating Virtual Machines.

We are looking forward to your response.

Windows 10: Windows Virtual Desktop is now generally available worldwide

Windows Virtual Desktop is now generally available worldwide

Windows Virtual Desktop is now generally available worldwide

Windows Virtual Desktop is now generally available worldwide

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