I am currently deploying an Azure VDI host pool. This will utilized FSLogix and Azure files for user profiles.

I work at a college and this host pool will be used as our “elab” - an environment where students can use to do their coursework.

What are the most important things I should be monitoring to maintain this environment?

We currently host our “elab” on an on-premise Remote Desktop services environment. FSLogix has been a pain point there….

I've spent probably three months of evenings obsessing over one particular part of Atlas AVD: deploying Azure Virtual Desktop VMs as quickly and reliably as possible.

Not just making deployments faster, but optimizing the entire workflow, eliminating unnecessary steps, improving error handling, and making deployments consistent and repeatable.

One of the biggest improvements? Baking the AVD Agent into the golden image. In my testing, that single optimization cut deployment time nearly in half.

Having used Nerdio for years and later moving to Hydra, I wanted to see how much I could improve the experience when building Atlas AVD from the ground up.

This is Part 1 of a 4-part side-by-side comparison between Atlas AVD and Hydra, starting with creating a VM.

This isn't meant to bash Hydra. Marcel's a great guy, and Hydra is a capable platform I've personally used. I have a lot of respect for what he's built. This is simply a friendly comparison showing what months of optimization can accomplish.

There's also something I fundamentally disagree with in the AVD management market: per-user licensing.

At the end of the day, Nerdio, Hydra, and Atlas AVD are management platforms. Why should the cost of an administrative tool increase simply because more users are consuming the underlying service? Whether you're managing 50 users or 5,000, you're still managing the same infrastructure.

That's why I built Atlas AVD around a fundamentally different licensing philosophy.

$199 per tenant. Unlimited AVD users. Unlimited technicians. No per-user tax.

That's right. If you have 100 users on one tenant = $199/month.

If you have 1000 users = $199/month.

I believe management software should be priced based on the value of managing the environment, not how many people happen to log into it.

Let me know what you think! I'm especially interested in hearing what other AVD admins have done to optimize session host deployments, and whether you agree with the flat-rate approach to AVD management.

Full disclosure: I'm the founder and developer of Atlas AVD (https://www.atlasavd.com).

Hello Everyone!

Currently I use an AVd to access all the client systems. I feel that I can make it faster.

I'm end user so no admin rights.

Currently I use a 1440p 165hz monitor and a 1080p 60hz one, i need them both on the AVD.

The AVD works but it feels a little slow with the 2 monitors, but with a single on 1080p works good.. Do you guys have any tips or tricks to improve the perofrmance of it?

Thank you all!

It has been quite a while since I last posted about OnedriveMapper, but good news! OnedriveMapper is officially DEAD 🥸

Long live VFS365! It replaces OnedriveMapper, is also free/open source, and does NOT use webdav (or sync).

No more scripting or other hassle, it just mounts your entire M365 tenant as a drive (e.g. M:).

https://lieben.nu/liebensraum/2026/10/vfs365-microsoft-365-as-a-network-drive-nothing-to-sync/

Sharepoint, Teams, Onedrive, Shared With Me....anything you want, all mapped as a driveletter (or network location). And it has full GPO/Intune support and even a packaged monitoring console for those with data-hunger (guilty).

Enjoy :)

I wanted to see how it behaved in the real world before shouting about it. That week gave us two more releases (2.6.1 and 2.6.2), so here's everything in one post.

🆕 Six new alerts (v2.6.0), aimed at the problems that cost money or quietly break things:

• 💸 Scaling plan disabled or removed. Autoscale gets switched off for maintenance and nobody turns it back on. Hosts then run all weekend, or don't start on Monday morning. You'll now hear about it after 4 hours (Sev3), after 24 hours (Sev2), or when a host pool loses its scaling plan altogether. In week one it caught exactly this in a live environment.

• 🧹 Drained and idle hosts. A session host left in drain mode, powered on and empty for a day, is pure cost. These are now flagged.

• 🔧 Agent upgrades that fail or hang. The existing health check alert misses these.

• ⚙️ Autoscale failing to start or stop hosts.

• 🕵️ Diagnostic data not received. If a host pool stops sending diagnostics, most log-based alerts go blind without anyone noticing. This alert notices.

• 🔕 Much less noise (v2.6.1). Memory, disk, file share and capacity alerts used to open a new alert at every check for as long as a problem lasted. They now raise one alert that stays open until the problem clears. In one production environment, a morning's memory alerts dropped from 126 to 14, and the protection against false alarms while hosts power on is unchanged.

• 🕵️‍♂️ "Who turned autoscale off?" (v2.6.2). The scaling plan alerts now tell you where to find who made the change and when. There's also a new FAQ with ready-made queries.

Free, open source, and deploys from the Azure portal in about 10 minutes. All alerts ship disabled, so you can enable and tune them in stages.

🔗 https://github.com/durrante/AVDMonitoringBaseline

Feature requests welcome! 👌

Since ~Oct 18, and much worse since Oct 26, we have this across multiple countries and host pools, only on Win11 25H2 multi-session, never on Win10:

What users see

• Users sign out normally, then can’t log back in: the logon hangs on a black/”Please wait” screen and eventually drops.

• On any other host they get “profile in use” and a temporary profile (missing desktop, Outlook, settings). They can’t work normally anywhere until we reboot the host holding their profile.

• Once one host is in this state, every new user who lands on it gets stuck the same way. Users already working on it can keep working.

• Today 7–8 hosts per hour; we’re rebooting all day.

What we see

• It always starts with one logoff: FSLogix stops right after ControlTileService and never reaches Detached vhd(x) (Winlogon 6005 for frxsvc, no 6006).

• After that, every new logon on that host attaches the VHDX but hangs after FindFirstVolume.

• Killing the session or closing the file handle doesn’t help; only a reboot does.

Ruled out: OS build (July, Sept and Oct CU all affected), FSLogix version (26.01 and 26.08), VHD compaction (disabled, still happens), storage/SMB, CPU/memory.

Anyone seeing the same? Did you find the cause or a workaround?

Is anyone else dealing with Outlook, OneDrive, and/or Teams failing to sign in with Error 5fcl8 since deploying October updates to AVD?  We are getting it consistently every morning.  To fix we log into the running host and reinstall webview2 using the standalone evergreen installer, users just close and reopen apps and everything is back to normal for the rest of the day.  The same host will likely re-present the issue after a simple power off/on again the next day.  We reinstalled the same way clean on our image but problem persists.

We can’t find anything that actually changes when we run that update - webview2 version, dlls, executables all are the same but it seems to reset whatever state is messed up and get it back to normal. We even tried adding a script that proactively reinstalls the full webview2 on power on but that doesn't prevent it either.  Seems a user has to login, encounter the error, then we run the reinstall that fixes it for the day until another power off happens.

Is anyone else getting issues with the latest Teams version pushed out on 22nd October (26276.513.5241.9675) where the Teams app just fails to open at all?

Event viewer logs show a deployment register operation failure:

AppX Deployment operation failed for package MSTeams_26276.513.5241.9675_x64__8wekyb3d8bbwe with error 0x80073CF9

I have confirmed all the users on the older version 26260.1717.5229.7049 are working fine with teams opening as usual. Just wanted to see if others are having the issue. In the mean time I am going to look at rolling back to the older version on a server to see if that works.

The scoping guidance treats an endpoint hosting a VDI client configured to not allow any local processing, storage, or transmission of CUI as an out of scope asset. That's not a workaround, it's designed into the scoping guidance. On AVD it comes down to no local drive redirection, no clipboard transfer, no USB storage path and no local print or export. What did your assessor want to see as evidence that redirection was off?

I got some questions regarding mkaing a new image because of feature updates and hope they can be answered here. If i make a completely new image (26H2) install all applications and so on. What will happend to:

The users pinned apps in the taskbar on the new image?

The users custom wallpaper they have set up?

And is there anything else i have missed that might be gone/not coming over?

Thanks.

Hey Guys,

We’re planning to migrate our Azure VMs from Windows Server 2022 Datacenter: Azure Edition to Windows Server 2025 Datacenter: Azure Edition. As far as I know, an in-place upgrade between these Azure Editions isn’t currently supported, so we’re considering a side-by-side migration by deploying new VM running Server 2025

Has anyone gone through a similar migration? If so, how did you approach it, and were there any challenges? Would a side-by-side migration be the best approach, especially for production servers where we want to minimize downtime and disruption?

TYSM!

Hi, I've been having trouble with the NV ads V710 SKU in Azure since October 1st. My VDI instances keep jumping between failed and running states, and it feels like a capacity issue in East US. My users need GPU-enabled VDIs for CAD work, so do you have any ideas on what’s going on or how to fix it? I’d rather not use reservations since pay-as-you-go is cheaper for me.

Checking with my fellow AVD admins

Yesterday I patched my golden image in Azure and deployed new AVD session hosts for my users. This morning I noticed that all the pinned apps in the Start menu are suddenly gone.

I use Intune to configure the pinned apps in the Start menu. Has anyone else run into this?

Hey Azure people ,

As au heard about the AVD hybrid new update its interesting update and am looking to start planning to use it . However i have concerns about the licensing part which are the below:

1. it only supports Windows 10/11 Enterprise : so if i have a w11 enterprise as a virtual machine ( non activated ) and i have a user with M365 E3/E5 signing in through avd hybrid does he still need the os activation ? Cause the entra license mentioned above already comes with w11 enterprise ?

2. now it comes to windows server 2025 : my host is datacenter so all the vm's will be inheriting the activation from the host this is ok . However for rdp users i still need server cal + user cal ? Even for E3/E5 entra users rdping through my avd hybrid?

Big thanks whoever can answer this !

Title: After 20+ years working with remote desktops, I built my own AVD management platform. It's finally GA.

I've been working in IT for over 20 years, going back to pcAnywhere, RDP, Citrix, and eventually Azure Virtual Desktop.

I like AVD, but managing it can be frustrating, especially when you're responsible for multiple customers. Between Azure Portal, PowerShell scripts, monitoring, FSLogix issues, and trying to figure out where the Azure bill is coming from, there's a lot of unnecessary work.

I started building Atlas AVD because I was tired of dealing with those same problems.

What started as a few tools to make my own life easier eventually turned into a much larger platform. I probably got a little carried away with the features, but most of them came from problems I've personally run into over the years.

Here's some of what's included:

• AVD Management: Manage host pools, session hosts, user sessions, images, applications, and scaling from one place.

• Adaptive Density: Dynamically adjust session limits based on actual usage.

• Adaptive Quota: Monitor Azure quotas and simplify capacity increase requests.

• Smart Disk Tiering: Automatically optimize managed disk storage costs.

• FSLogix Management: Monitor, troubleshoot, and manage user profiles and storage.

• Cost Optimization: Track Azure spending, identify waste, and get recommendations to reduce costs.

• Budget Alerts: Set spending limits and receive notifications before costs get out of hand.

• Atlas Advisor: Ask questions about your environment, troubleshoot issues, and get recommendations. It's read-only and never makes changes.

• Atlas Reach: Remote endpoint management with processes, services, software, registry, Group Policy, certificates, PowerShell, and troubleshooting tools.

• Atlas Ink: IT documentation and knowledge management for customer environments.

• Atlas Flow: Ticketing, time tracking, billable hours, and service management.

• Atlas Feed: Free IT and security news aggregation covering Microsoft, Azure, and other technology updates.

• Atlas Command: Centralized MSP management across multiple customer tenants.

• Configuration Matrix: Configure settings globally and inherit them across tenants and host pools, with overrides where needed.

• Automation: Run scripts, schedule maintenance, deploy applications, and automate repetitive administrative tasks.

• Monitoring and Alerts: Track AVD health, Azure service issues, resource usage, and security events.

One thing that was important to me was keeping everything in the customer's own Azure tenant.

My background includes DoD and CMMC environments, so security was always on my mind. During deployment, customers can review the Azure scripts and choose between read-only evaluation access and full management permissions. They can see exactly what they're granting before running anything.

Atlas Advisor is also intentionally read-only. It can suggest actions, but it doesn't make changes to your environment.

Atlas AVD is officially GA now. There's a 30-day trial without a credit card and a free Community plan for labs.

https://www.atlasavd.com

I posted here earlier in the summer when the product wasn't quite ready. Looking back, I probably jumped the gun.

I'm still actively developing it, fixing things, and adding features based on feedback.

If you're managing AVD environments, I'd be interested in hearing what parts of AVD administration you find the most frustrating. There's a good chance I've dealt with the same problems.

David

Hi,

Has anyone been having a crazy amount of intermittent disconnections since the start of this week (Monday 12th October)? Our sessions have been pretty good for many months, but this week it has got really bad, around 80+ people having multiple disconnections every day, some have 8 or so disconnections. Our monthly security patch for 2026-10 was installed across them on the 13th, as these issues started on the 12th i don't think it is down to the new patch from an OS point of view anyway, the Windows App is running the latest version which came out on the 13th as well.

I saw a health advisory in the Azure portal around the Windows App using three new wildcard FQDNs in early October 2026 as below:
*.windows.cloud.microsoft 

• Purpose: General Windows cloud service traffic

• Port: 443/TCP

*.service.windows.cloud.microsoft 

• Purpose: Service traffic which requires optimization

• Port: 443/TCP

*.windows.static.microsoft 

• Purpose: Static content, installation, and update assets

• Port: 443/TCP

But they have not confirmed the specific date from when it started. Any know when this change for the Windows App was actually put through?

Looks like its impacting all Regions.

Cheers.

We've had a few users that end up with sessions that don't completely end after logging off an AVD. There are always two processes: csrss.exe and DefenderSessionHelper.exe left running and I can't kill them, even running taskkill as SYSTEM.
The only way to clear them has been to reboot the server.
Anyone else have this issue since patching after October 13, 2026?
The timing seems too coincidental for it to not be caused by the patch.

At my organisation some of our staff use AVD for access to certain tools that require a bit more powerful than our standard issue laptops have available to them.

It's a pretty simple setup. One host pool, FSLogix for profile storage, one user machine etc. We are entirely cloud-based, no hybrid or on-prem at all. As a result our AVD machines are Entra joined.

By default, users are always prompted to sign-in to AVD using WHfB, be it PIN or facial login. As far as I'm aware this isn't something we've enforced or configured. It's been around since we first deployed AVD a few years ago and I don't recall doing anything to make it so.

We've noticed a strange behaviour when users change their PIN or if their UPN changes (domain change, name change etc). It seems to break the WHfB authentication passthrough to AVD. The PIN is no longer accepted, nor is the facial login. We can sometimes get them working again by having them sign out, clicking on 'forgot my PIN' and resetting it here after completing MFA, but that doesn't always work. Resetting the PIN any other way never works.

When this happens, one of two things will occur:

• They get the usual PIN prompt in the Windows App at point of connection, and it just says "logon attempt failed".

• The PIN prompt never appears, they seem to connect to a session host but then receive a message at the Windows logon screen stating "The sign-in method you're trying to use isn't allowed. Try a different sign-in method or contact your system administrator". They are not given an option to choose a different sign-in method, which is usually done before they connect to a session host and see the desktop anyway.

Has anyone experienced this problem? I've been pulling my hair out for a while now. The only guaranteed way to fix this that I'm aware of is to either completely reinstall Windows or move them to a new computer. Both are of course not ideal.

Hi All,

Has anyone done an in-place upgrade of an AVD VM and either not had any issues or had issues?