Modernize Your VDI Estate with Nerdio & Azure Storage | Azure Storage Talk

[music] Hey Scott, good to be connecting with you again. When it comes to VDI landscape, no better person than you to be talking about that. So quite excited about that. >> Thanks. I'm looking forward to the conversation today. >> Yeah, let's start with something uh simple. Uh how do you see the BDI landscape shifting and what are the top challenges you hear from our joint customers? Yeah, it actually is a simple question but a very interesting one because we're living in what I call an era that's unlike anything we've seen in the EU space that we're calling the great migration. uh because they're seeing more organizations shifting from their existing solutions to look to modernize their organizations are really reassessing their aging platforms because they're dealing with rising costs, more security pressure and preparing for things like new agentic workforce where autonomous AI agents work alongside people and have very similar compute needs. So the VDL landscape is really shifting from a specialized solution for a limited set of users to a more strategic platform for secure work across humans and agents and customers are supporting more distributed teams like contractors or navigating M&A uh dealing with regulated workloads and increasingly AI enabled ways of working and they really want to deliver desktops and applications quickly but they also need the environment to be secure costefficient easy to operate at scale and elastic to adjust to everanging needs. So the top challenges we hear are really about controlling costs, maintaining consistent end user experience and simplifying the identity and management all while reducing the complexity that appears as deployments grow. This sounds interesting. With the pressure to drive change, what should organization do first as they reassess their VDI and broader end user computing strategy? In other words, you really need to start by understanding the users, the work they do, the outcomes and business needs. And really, a successful migration is not just about moving everyone into one single new environment all at once. Customers should really assess various personas within their organization, their specific applications and data needs, understand the identity requirements, performance expectations, and then map each group to the right cloud desktop approach that creates really a modernization plan instead of the simple one fits oneizefits-all lift and shift migration that we've often heard about. Yeah, that's an interesting perspective. Okay, we have been partnering with Nario for many years and it has become an important management layer for Windows cloud environments like Windows 365 and Azure virtual desktop. What is unique about the way NIO works with Azure? Well, Nio is really focused on meeting customers where they are in their cloud journey. [snorts] Uh, as you know, Microsoft is the clear leader in desktop as a service innovation, and customers now have more options than ever, which is great, but it adds a little more complexity in trying to understand all the different deployment models across DVD and Windows 365. And now with AVD supporting hybrid and Windows 365 with new, more flexible deployment models using the new flex options, that choice is powerful, but it also means customers need help selecting, deploying, and optimizing the right solutions for their needs. And so Nerdio helps customers take advantage of that Microsoft innovation by bringing the planning, deployment, management, autom uh automation and cost optimization all while providing operational insights into a single one experience. And our really is to our role is really to help customers get to the right Windows cloud solution and operate it successfully on Azure. And we bring things like host pools and images, user management, scaling, storage, identity, all of these into a single operating experience. So instead of deploying compute then asking another team to configure profile shares. Nio makes storage part of the deployment workflow from the beginning that really creates a more repeatable design that customers can use across deployments regions or even different tenants if they're set up that way. >> That makes sense. One of the most frequently asked questions to us is that what changes for ID admin when they use Nardio instead of managing each solution independently. Yeah, it's really about moving from managing disconnected components to really operating from one centralized view. NO gives IT teams visibility into the environment, makes recommendations to control costs, and provides us analytics to understand the usage and performance and the automation to simplify these day-to-day operations IT admins typically deal with. And it's not just about making it easier, it's about helping the customer optimize the environment today, understand what will change in the next few months, and plan for what they might need in the next year. And for the IT team, that means less custom scripting, fewer handoffs, fewer configuration differences between environments, and administrators can apply a standard design, automate the repetitive work, and spend more time improving the service instead of simply looking down at their feet and troubleshooting uh the typical drift they see. It also gives them a clear way to apply governance consistently as their environment grows. makes sense that becomes especially important as customer move from early deployments to broader production rollouts. Scale is another factor when enrollment scale user experience depends on whether identity profiles storage and policy are designed together. Scott, when customer move from a pilot to hundreds and thousands of users, what does that complexity become most visible? It really comes down to the end user experience. You know, different job groups have different applications, different data, different performance needs. So customers should not simply treat modernization as a single mass migration. They really need to understand the specific needs of each persona within their organization. They need to rightsize those environments and make sure the profile and storage layer can support peak usage, not just the static usage. Example of this is like during signin in a pilot concurrent and you know when they might be running a pilot concurrency can be really low and everything seems to work very fast but then when you really scale to the enterprise level and many users are trying to sign in at the same time. Every profile has to attach quickly and reliably. I mean the bar is the experience an end user has with flipping the lid up on their laptop and their virtualization environment should work the same way. And if storage, identity, host pool configur configurations are all all managed separately, those small differences can become userfacing problems and that can affect the end user experience both in signin time, the how often they have to pick up the phone and call support and we know that's no fun on either end of those calls. The productivity of employees and just the overall operating cost of their environment and this is why storage and identity have to be treated as part of the core VDI architecture, not just something you think about later after you define the compute layer. >> That makes sense. Thank you, Scott. Yeah, and on that topic, Gong, um, profile performance is directly tied to the experience users feel every day and FS logic profile containers are directly in the signet path as we talked about attaching that user profile the time they log in to a VM and a host pool. From a storage perspective, why do you think Azure file storage is such an important foundation for the user experience? >> That's a good question. The FS logic profile is part of every user sign in and so file service behind it has to be dependable. So we have a portfolio approach Azure files and Azure net files. Let's start with Azure files which provides a fully managed SMB service that is integrated with the Azure platform and also Azure net files which is a highly performance file service. So customer do not have to deploy or maintain file servers. They gain Azure native capabilities for security monitoring, snapshots, backups and life cycle management. The goal is to provide the profile workload a consistent storage foundation that can scale with the complex Azure virtual desktop network. Yeah, you and I have been working through this for some time while I was at Microsoft and now from the other side it's exciting to see all the innovation driving forward and one of the problems we were always working on was trying to solve some of these login storms because they're very bursty as we talked about. You know, when you're starting with a a pilot, you may not see these issues, but when you truly run this at enterprise scales, these often become part of that poor end user experience. And I know one of the things you guys have been working on are Azure files provisioned v2. How does this change performance and cost equations for customers now? >> Yeah, we have to evolve our file storage service along with the bursty workload that we see that with virtual desktop solutions. Remember years ago we run into you know we were not able to scale along with that and then I agree that login storms are very busty. Profile warups may store moderate amount of data but they can require significant IOPS and throughput when many users sign in together in the morning and then log off together at the around like in the evening. So we designed provision v2 to separate capacity, IOPS and throughput so that customer can tune each of the dimension that needs to do the workload. They no they no longer have to purchase excess capacity only to reach a performance target. They can fine-tune based on the performance requirement and then at the same time optimize cost. So this gives them the most precise cost control while supporting predictable performance during peak periods. So effectively you've got a dial for the amount of capacity you need and IOPS as two separate dials as opposed to have those bundled together and oftent times having to over buy the capacity to get the performance. >> Yeah, that's basically precisely you said it during our early days. You mentioned about the cost right that hey um I have to buy hundreds of pabytes but you only need 20 terabytes to meet the performance and then we separate those two dimensions so you can just purchase based on the IOPS and throughput requirements which is more pertinent to those bursty login workloads. So Scott Azure provides those storage cap capabilities. How does Nardio make them easier for customer to deploy and operate? Well, Nerdio turns a storage design into a repeatable operational workflow. We can automate share creation, configure permissions, connect the storage to a host pool, and apply the FS logic settings all as part of the deployment. So, the administrators not have to rebuild that configuration through separate scripts every time. Azure provides outer storage platform as you outlined and Nerdio helps customers use it consistently across their environments. So, we we talked about identity a few times here and I think that's obviously one of the most important things with architecture. Let's just talk a little bit how Azure files now supports cloudnative identity model. Identity for SMB access has historically added a lot of complexity. So what makes Microsoft enter ID off for Azure files unlock new capabilities for customers? That's a very uh interesting question. It enables a more cloudnative architecture. Entra ID join session host can access Azure files without customers maintaining traditional domain infrastructure solely for profile storage that can simplify networking reduce infrastructure overhead and remove another operational dependency. It also helps align the desktop environment with customer broader zero trust and cloud identity strategy. Yeah, often organizations as they're moving to Windows cloud, they're doing this as part of a modernization strategy and and often that means modernizing how they do endpoint management and modernizing identity. So, it's great that now they can do this journey end to end now and take advantage of things like Azure files with the the simple intra ID join. This is a major reduction of complexity for organizations. Yes, you said it better than I do. And and Scott, uh, the Azure capability is available at the platform layer. And how does Nardio make the identity model usable across real customer environments, right? If you think about uh storage, we are a platform player. So we rely on partner like you to abstract the capability and then make it more usable to the customer. So I would love to hear your perspective on that. Yeah, we sort of have a principle about when when we add something like this to Nerdio, we think about it. Does this capability create value when customers need to apply it in a way that needs to be repeatable and safe? So, if it's a one-time task, you know, probably not as much value, but if these are the kind of tasks that you consistently have to do and you need to ensure that it's done in a way that provides that all your governance model and and uh and end user experiences. So, identity is a huge part of that configuration. So we think about um setting up your share permissions and your FS logics FS logic settings. We want to bring that into one standardized workflow. Instead of assembling the design through a separate scripts and manual handoffs to another team that can apply the configuration and manage it want to make this all simple to use whether you're deploying to AVD or Windows 365 or a mix of both of those. >> That makes sense. Uh we have covered the Azure storage and identity foundation and how Nardio operationalized it. So uh it's good to hear principal based approach and let's turn to day-to-day operations. Scott because customer ultimately measure success through user experience governance and cost. So customer do not buy automation for its own sake. What outcomes do they see when audio manage manages Windows cloud solutions on Azure? Yeah, really it's ensuring that the outcome is more predictable, right? So that customers can deploy environments in a more consistent way, reduce configuration drift, be able to monitor the entire estate from one place and then scale resources according to demand. So really taking advantage of the elasticity and flexibility that the cloud providers provides. Administrator does not have to coordinate a collection of disconnected tools. And with this effort, users see more consistent signins. the organization has a clear understanding of how performance is and they get more predictability and their cost uh really related to the actual usage instead of things like we talked about earlier buying more storage than you need or leaving VMs running when users don't need them or oversizing machines based on you know traditional models where it's capital kind of expenditure where you're buying you know compute resources that need to last 3 to 5 years really taking full advantage of the cloud where you know the users need might change on a daily bas basis, monthly basis, yearly basis and be able to flex in whatever dimension you need whether that is anyone users compute needs or the collection of a group of users within the organization. >> On that front, how do governance and data protection fit into the operating model? >> Yeah, that's that's kind of the motherhood and apple pie. You know, governance has to be part of that standard configuration, not something you think about later. And customers can consistently apply role-based access controls, snapshots, backup, data protection policies across all these environments. And it really makes it easier to demonstrate how the service can be controlled and protected. And the goal is an audit ready operating model rather than a collection of one-off decisions organizations would navigate. Sounds good. What should customer measure to know their architecture is working? >> Yeah. Moving from a computing model where you know you're on a laptop, you flip the lid up and you're instantly at your desktop. When you move to virtualization, it's really important that that first time signin experience is great. you know, we talked about that, you know, burst you can see at 9:00 a.m. on everybody logging in, you can have that whole burst and need your IOPS to really go up really high for that peak need. Um, so signin experience is one and that that latency for the profile to attach to the VM is part of that, but it also track profile related support incidents, right? Like it's not just that um how how well it works in in you know green field environment, but how does it adapt when there are issues? How do you get that visibility and how do you make it easy to remediate the these items? And at the end of the day, you're trying to control cost, right? You want to operate this with a great enduser experience. You want to ensure that your overhead of managing it or simply not having operational efficiency leading to unexpected costs as well. And Azure files is really the foundation of many of these profile environments. But often times, as we talked about, customers might have different desktop personas with different requirements. How do you guys now support the broader Azure storage portfolio? >> Yeah, both Azure files and Azure net files are strong starting points for many FS logic environments because it provides a manage manage file storage with DB Azure integration. But Azure Net Files is available when customers need higherend files performance, specialized enterprise capabilities and advanced data management requirements. And on the other hand we also have manage disc support which is a session host and then bus personal desktop layers. So the the platform advantage is that customer can select the storage service that fits to their desktop persona while remaining within the Azure security management and support boundary. Yeah, I think that's been a great partnership with all the innovation you're driving and our ability to unify all of this through a consistent workflow and then take advantage of all these different deployment models and all while supporting modern identities as we talked about before or if they're still using hybrid identities and the fact that they can work across all these storage solutions now really opens up the opportunity for organizations to pick just the right storage solution to meet their needs. >> Yeah, that sounds good. And Scott, customers value their choice and they also want simplicity. So it we have to be mindful about why we can keep innovating and then coming up with many storage choices but we need partner like NIO to help with that and how does NIO help them operationalize the right storage service for each environment. Yeah as you mentioned having all these options is great um and but it adds complexities. So at Nerdio we really want to give administrators a consistent management experience across all these Azure stored options including Azure files and Azure NetUP files. And of course, we want to help them apply the appropriate service through standardized policies, deployment workflows rather than creating a separating model for every single storage choice. So customers get the flexibility of the full Azure portfolio while Nerdio reduces the complexity of deploying and managing the right service for each persona within your organization. Yeah, that's the key combination. Azure provides the integrated platform and the right story choices while Nardio turns those capabilities into a simpler more repeatable operating experience and then that makes this partnership a very compelling one in my opinion and many customers still have legacy profile data and hybrid dependencies. What is the practical modernization path? Yeah, that practical path really starts with understanding the current profile data, the dependencies on identity and the various groups within the organization and what their specific needs are and then select the appropriate Azure file platform. Amazing that we have so many choices now and really defining a standard target configuration and as necessary migrate those users in controlled ways as we talked about earlier. It's not this one big lift and shift. Um, and of course, Nerdto can help apply the same policy and configuration to each wave as you work through your various personas. We off uh recommend measuring sign-in performance, as I mentioned earlier, and the overall end user experience throughout that move rather than treating modernization as this single big bang event. Obviously, it's a lot easier to kind of fly the plane while you're building it, you know, versus doing this just one big holistic move. And so our tools are designed to help you with those migrations and then to measure performance and the end user experiences along the way. And once things look like they're moving smoothly, then you can sort of ramp up your deployment model. >> As cloud PCs and AI enable work patterns grow, what becomes more important? Scott, >> that's a tough question. Well, as I mentioned earlier, secure security is key, right? And reliable access to enterprise data, it becomes even more important. And whether the user is working through a cloud PC, ABD, uh, bare metal or an AI assisted experience, the platform needs to enforce those identity controls, ensure we're delivering predictable performance for the users, and of course protect the data all the while. Any access patterns might evolve, but the need for strong storage identity and governance foundation doesn't change. This is a good place to close. The experience may change, but the platform fundamentals remain the same. Scott, what is one message that you want an IT leader to take away? >> Well, as I mentioned earlier, um to get this great uh experience of all the innovation Microsoft is driving uh Nerdio tools provides all the tools to help them take advantage of all these core capabilities. I mentioned earlier that we had an announcement at our Nerdio event in May where we're now giving away a free tool to organizations called Nerdio Compass. It will be available in the Azure marketplace soon and this tool helps them navigate these choices. It can help provide insights into whatever virtualization solution they're using today, whether it's Citrix, Omnisa, Workspaces, or even ABD and Windows 365 and on a on a per user basis or group of users basis can identify what kind of value they would see both in terms of experience and cost savings moving to one of the Windows cloud solutions, whether that's AVD or Windows 365 or some of these new capabilities offered through Windows 365 like um uh Windows 365 Flex for personal desktops for shared desktops. So, we're really excited about all the innovation Microsoft keeps creating here in this space and all the new options they give and it creates a great opportunity for us to help customers navigate those options, ensure they're getting the right solution to meet their uh various users. This sounds good. Uh I think let's call to action is try to use Nardio compass on Azure marketplace to begin assessment and to learn more connect with Azure storage on Nario teams with the contacts shown on the screen and thank you Scott for joining us. >> My pleasure on great to be on a call with you again. >> Thank you. >> [music]