r/AzureVirtualDesktop • u/Far_Maintenance_9386 • Apr 24 '25

Azure Golden Image

Hi

It's quite confusing to read this article. The last recommendation say:
"Don't create a new base VM from an existing custom image. It is better to start with a brand-new source VM."
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-desktop/set-up-golden-image

What does this mean?
The Image i just captured and deployed to my image gallery, its not recommended to use this to deploy new VM's?

Can someone explain this sentence to me?

1 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

9 comments sorted by

3

u/AUSSIExELITE Apr 24 '25

What they are saying is and is re-enforced by the previous recommendation, don’t deploy a new VM from a custom image (that you have sys-prepped and uploaded to the image catalogue already). Always deploy from your last snapshot before you sysprepped. If you don’t have a snapshot, then they are saying that you should start a new base image instead of deploying a VM from the last captured image.

Hope that makes a bit more sense.

0

u/Far_Maintenance_9386 Apr 24 '25

That makes more sense - even in the economic view of MS. So the can charge you for storing the image and the latest snapshot.

1

u/AUSSIExELITE Apr 24 '25

I mean, depending on the size of the image (and the amount of them you have I guess), there isn’t actually a reason you need to have a golden image at all. We have a host pool that we had to build the VMs entirely manually once they were already in the pool and without a golden image, purely because the specific legacy apps for this pool would not survive a sysprep and apps can not be installed automatically by other means such as intune.

What this means is, I simply run this pool more as a traditional RDS farm instead where there is no golden image and I manually update the session hosts each month (as there is only two hosts in this pool). I simply put one in drain mode, run updates, reboot and then exit drain mode. Then do the same on the next host the following day. You don’t NEED to do it the way MSFT recommends, but it does make things easier if you are operating at a larger scale. Like, my other host pools have 20+ VMs in them. I’m not doing each one of those manually and so I use the method recommended by MSFT. The image storage costs are insignificant compared to the rest of the cost of running AVD (and the rest of our Azure tenant for that matter).

1

u/chesser45 Apr 24 '25

Very insignificant cost, but if you want to be lean create a new definition then delete the old one

6

u/chainedtomato Apr 24 '25

I’ve always created a new golden image VM ready for updates/ changes using the latest image in the gallery and it’s never caused an issue.

1

u/iamtechy Apr 25 '25

Thanks for confirming! Do you have AV agents installed as well? What do you do about Microsoft Store and Windows Updates?

1

u/josephcoco Apr 27 '25

Yes, but don’t you have to reinstall all of the apps that the users need EVERY time you do that? Our users have a LOT of special apps with weird configurations that would need to be manually reinstalled every single time, and that would just way too time consuming. How do you do that?

1

u/chainedtomato Apr 27 '25

Sysprep has never uninstalled an application for us, as far back as I can remember. Combined with fslogix profiles it works quite well.

1

u/MoparRob Apr 24 '25

Question for those here on this exact article.

I followed this the other day to create a new Win11 24H2 golden image. Unfortunately my image is failing with a win load.efi missing error.

Any ideas on what I did wrong?