Microsoft Ignite 2023: get all the new announcements | Windows in the Cloud
hi folks welcome at another winners in the cloud special this time all around the new Windows 365 and Azure virtual desktop announcements at microsof ignite and I have all the product leaders here to tell you everything about it so let's get [Music] started I'm super excited to be joined by various m of the Windows 365 and Azure virture desktop leadership team that will share all the announcements we did at microsopic KN but before they do so please make sure to follow us on aka.ms winners in thecloud or on our Tech Community page so hi Scott great to have you back here how are you doing doing well thanks Chris John hey can you share a little bit about yourself and what you do at Microsoft sure so I'm Scott Manchester and I'm a vice president of product for Windows 365 and Azure virtual desktop a 23y year veteran at Microsoft and spent like the last half of my career working in this virtualization space it's great to have you back as a rear curring guest on this show and this time I really would like to have you summarizing all those exciting features and and and announcements we just did at mik of ignite this year in 2023 can you give an overview of what are those announcements and we also have demos coming later on but before we do so can you give that heads up to the audience yeah what an incredible event we had so much new features across avd and Windows 365 to share I'll start with some of the announcements on Windows 365 and some of these things are common uh capabilities that span both products so you may hear me talking about them twice in the context of Windows 365 and as your virtual desktop so we are super excited to announce some new AI capabilities with Windows 365 that provides incredible tools for admins to be able to understand the usage of their Windows 365 deployment the they can now see alerts and dashboards that will show them their undersized oversized underutilized and right-sized Cloud PCS and give them specific actions to take to either adjust a user's Cloud PC up or down or take back licenses that might not be used and assign them to someone else and in tune Suite support which includes EPM and remote help lots of new dashboards and insights on connectivity uh allowing you to understand the latency uh and connection up time for your users and of course we shared again some of the exciting new capabilities that Windows 365 Frontline bring for our customers as well and also we've now uh opened up the preview for the VMware integration with Windows 365 now to everyone so if you're a VMware customer and you want to try this out you can sign up now and get full access to that on the end user experience side we had so much new things to share there it was incredible the work that we've done on the new unified applications across Windows Mac iOS uh and then Android coming soon and many of those are available now for preview and of course we were so excited to share that we finally were able to deliver on the single sign on experience for both avd and Windows 365 making it much easier for your users to sign on with a single onetime password and on the platform level based on very strong feedback from you guys from our customers and partners uh we're now bringing G Q skes to Windows 365 so there's a limited preview program available now we'll be rolling this out further next year and again by popular demand we've brought forward a 16 core skew offering for Windows 365 as well and then on the avd front lots of new innovation there as well we're now going live with a new personal desktop Auto scaling to allow you to control your cost for personal desktop deployments uh We've extended the capabilities of our msix app attach now making it easier for you to create packag packages that can span multiple multiple host pools and again that new unified app brings avd and Windows 365 experiences together in a single unified app now and it's beautiful really encourage you to go check out the previews of that and as I mentioned before that single sign on experience now works across Windows 365 and as your virtual desktop and again another very popular request from our customers to be able to extend the capabilities of ab on Prem now through Azure stack HCI we announc that that will be coming soon next year so a really incredible uh set of announcements a lot of these things were really driven by the feedback from the audience like we have here today so keep that feedback coming and we'll keep innovating and and delivering on those new capabilities hey thanks Scott great announcements and great to have you here on the show as well so how can people stay in touch with you on social media sure so you can find me on LinkedIn at Scott Manchester and also on X at RDS foru well that's an unique name there Scott little bit of the history there and now I want to move to the exciting partner announcements with dab so Deb hi can you introduce yourself real quick hi I'm Deb du bro I'm a group product manager for Windows 365 and is your virtual desktop and I'm responsible for Partnerships and for small and medium business offerings great to have you here as well can you share some of the great announcements we just did at Mike of ignite sure I'm really excited to be able to talk about some of the work we've been doing with our approved providers and at ignite we talked about the work we're doing with VMware on our integration with Windows 365 and VMware Horizon it's now in public preview and it's available for everybody to get started with today uh VMware Horizon Cloud customers can now just deliver a secure personalized high performance Windows Experience while still using the VMware control plane they're familiar with and the and user experiences that their end users are accustomed to I'm going to quickly show you how easy tenant onboarding is if you look on the screen tenant onboarding is done through Microsoft InTune where it admins will enable the VMware connector and then the admin will switch over to VMware to establish the connection between the VMware tenant and the Windows 365 tenant and then they just need to onboard users and we've made that quite straightforward as well customers can also use VMware app volume to deliver and manage apps in their Azure virtual desktop and Windows 365 deployments and that's true whether they're using Microsoft's native virtualization products or VMware Horizon and then Citrix has been making Citrix VM creation on Azure faster with Citrix machine creation services on Azure now Citrix customers can start or deallocate 5,000 VMS in less than 15 minutes it's a huge time saer for admins deployment of our partners Solutions is getting easier too we've worked with Citrix to launch Citrix on Landing Zone accelerator this tool is just so helpful for helping it admins provision production ready Citrix on Azure workloads for Enterprise scale and success it provides Citrix design guidance reference architecture and actual code to get you started and then finally we're continuing to expand the options for Linux clients tenzig Dell HP igel and computing and stratodesk all have clients that will work with Azure virtual desktop and Windows 365 and elel has just launched a new client tailored to Windows 365 thanks dab great partner announcements especially the ones with Yen and catrix I think it really helps customers uh to solve uh challenges or serve their needs where they are today how can people stay in touch with you people can find me at LinkedIn I'm Deb Duo and thanks for thanks for having me Christian this was really fun thanks de app and now I'm super excited to talk about the Windows app the new unified app across Windows 365 and ab and we have Phil here which I know very well hi Phil how are you doing hey good how are you Christian here I'm good too thanks hey can you share a little bit more about those NG's experiences announcements we just did at ignite sure yeah um I'll I'll dive in on the Windows app itself um so you know we've got a unification of bunch of different apps that remote desktop apps that we've had in the market for years and years um and uh we really wanted to uh just do something simple across every platform so all major platforms will be getting a new Windows app the look and feel will be consistent across those platforms uh and you know um what we're aiming for is to have uh all of our remoting Technologies available in each app so for Windows 365 AV remote desktop and and uh RDS you'll be able to use one set of apps uh across all major platforms um and we'll be bringing Windows uh web Mac OS and iOS to Market uh right around ignite uh with Android coming soon thanks Phil and this is really exciting for customers using all those products that you just mentioned to make the use experience really um yeah topnotch in my opinion here hey can you show as well how it looks and feels in a demo absolutely chrisan um what I'll do is I'll take folks through the iOS demo which is a good representation of all platforms so let's take a look at uh the you know the new um user experience here on the homepage what you're going to see across the top are all of your cloud and uh remote desktops laid out so right here I've got a Windows 365 Cloud PC Windows 365 Dev box and an avd uh desktop that I can access access and these are all desktops laid out across the top and then um down below I'll have my pinned applications uh for remote apps that I could access directly if I had avd applications through um assigned to me through my organization uh across the bottom there what you'll see is a home devices and apps uh tab as well and so if I click on those I'm going to get all of the devices all of the apps my organization has assigned to me and in many cases I'll have uh more than what you're seeing on the screen and so this Home tab gives me a way to just pin and organize my most frequently used stuff where uh the devices and apps Tabs are going to give me access to all of the resources I I have available to me in this same way if I had a local machine then um where I've got a remote desktop connection that'll also show up here um across the top if I've pinned it to my favorites as well as in the uh devices tab down below so this model works for all four of those Services I mentioned before for remote desktop RDS ABD and Windows 365 so if I go ahead and click on um you know connect here uh on any of these desktops uh we've got a nice you know transition uh that you're probably familiar with before if you've been using our um applications where I'm going to Simply remote into that session here we've got a cloud PC and you can see now I'm in Windows running it on an iPad I can use a keyboard and a mouse and that's full uh productivity machine for me anywhere I might be um and I've got an expense report that I can uh now go ahead and take a look at um that's running inside this Windows machine all the apps uh have that same um kind of layout at that same architecture um they're very consistent across the different um platforms there are some you know obviously some cool things that we can do uh they're a little bit different um per platform in terms of screen sharing and multim monitor and and all sorts of things um and all of that will be carried forward from the remote desktop apps that we have in the various stores today um but you'll see these new Windows apps coming up very soon in the market so yeah that's um you know a great illustration with the IOS app of what you'll uh what you'll be able to experience on all of our platforms we're really excited uh with Ignite to be able to announce this and get this into people's hands we will be uh you know looking for feedback um during our uh period here uh for the next um few months and then uh looking to make these generally available across all uh all of our major platforms um in in 2024 um so please give us feedback um go check out all the apps and the stores and uh we're uh we're very excited to be having these out in the market well thanks Phil really amazing great demos and great use experience so thanks for being back in a guest on this show how can people stay in touch with you yeah best way is LinkedIn uh I'm just Philip G uh with one L um I do use Twitter a little bit but not so much so uh you know hit me on LinkedIn and and uh glad to connect thanks Phil and now I'm super excited to talk about GPU skes as part of cloud PCS and other skes and other enhancements we did on the platform side as well with bavia here so Hi bavia how are you doing hi kran I'm good how are you I'm good too thanks for being on this to this episode I'm super excited about the things you're going to show but can you first tell the audience a little bit what you do at Microsoft yeah of course hi everyone I'm a group product manager for Windows 365 and Azure virtual desktop I lead the platform and security teams can you show some of those great announcements in a demo format thanks chran yes I'm very excited to talk about the new skes that we released at ignite let's first start with 16 vcpu we now have two new 16 vcpu SKS in introduced as part of Windows 365 this is for all the workloads that need memory intensive applications think fsis think belth management apps for those workloads we've introduced two skes with two storage options and you'll see that available in your licensing programs now yeah this is great bafia but I'm also super excited about the gpus SK so can you show what we have there yes absolutely at ignite we're launching the new limited public preview for GPU SKS you'll see the options for what SKS we're offering and the NDA pricing uh as you sign up for public preview there's a link there to sign up for the public preview but let me actually quickly show you a good demo of what it would mean to work on a GPU enabled Cloud PC if you're someone who works with complex Graphics workloads you're going to love GPU enabled Cloud pcs one of the things you'll notice right away is when you use feature Rich apps like like adobi Premier Pro you can see how real time scaling is working so smoothly just like it would work on a physical device will then go on to seeing 3D sampler where you can interact with 3D models in real-time rendering at any zoom level notice how fast it responds and even the light follows Every Move I Make blender is a popular application for 3D content and you'll notice that I have no problems interacting with this complex model that is showing this cool Bakery seat once again Everything feels very responsive just like it's on my desktop at home and what you're seeing on your screen right now is the unen super position benchmarking tool it scales our gpus essentially throttles them and you can see that we're getting 125 to 225 frame rates per second within this GPU enabled VM thanks Bia great demo and this is just great news because lots of Customs have been waiting for gpus as part of cloud PC so super excited to see this coming to live can you share once more the link that they can use to join this preview absolutely please sign up at ak. ms365 GPU let's move to some other exciting news security news and platform news as you you own it as part of the team as well can you share more there absolutely I have tons to share on security when we think about Security in our team we think about zero trust principles and there's about three categories that matter we talk about secure identities secure access and secure data and what you'll see is a few Demos in each of those three categories and all the news that we're sharing there at ignite let's begin with first secure identities first V G8 single sign on and passwordless O is part of both Windows 365 and ABD what you're seeing on the screen is a demo of how you would be able to file a Windows 365 provisioning policy and enable able the single sign on it's right at the bottom of the screen here you're also able to apply the single sign on setting to your existing provisioned Cloud PCS they will go through a restart but it's not a full reprovision but you will be able to apply that setting to your existing Cloud PCS we are not doing that demo today but you're also able to do that as part of azure virtual desktop where you can go into the RDP properties and set up the single sign on for your host pools I'm very excited for this it's the reason that we've had modern fish resistant off mechanisms and now we support all of them all the way from your Windows app that you heard from Phil earlier going all the way into the cloud PC session as well as the apps within the session now let's talk a little bit about secure data we have tons of Investments that we made to make sure that your data is protected on your Cloud PC first is watermarking and screen capture protection these are security features that protect against unauthorized access and manipulation of data they prevent preventative measures to discourage data leaks of internal and classified company Resources with watermarking you can add a traceable Watermark to Cloud PCS and AV desktops it's a security measure that can help prevent Data Theft making it easier for you to trace uh a leak if there was any the source of the leak and with screen capture protection which works alongside watermarking that helps you prevent sensitive information from being captured from your virtual desktop it could be done through your print screen or your slipping tool or 3p applications on the client all of them prevent the capture of the screen and you're able to prevent your sensitive information from leaking we also introduced the customer manage Keys feature that's going into public preview in December where Windows 365 customers will be able to use their own encryption keys to protect data on your Cloud PC discs think of the data being hosted in Microsoft data centers and now you have more security and more control on who has access to that data we also introduced customer logbox where Windows 365 on call Engineers need your explicit approval to be able to access your content in case of troubleshooting purposes the flow makes sure that you get approval and all of the actions by the Microsoft engineer is audited if it's happening against your data and last to the secure data category let's talk about perview endpoint DLP DLP is data loss prevention we integrated with Microsoft perview to make sure that any data that is reiding in your environment or your VMS is protected and can be detected if there's a leak you can also block any sensitive information from leaving your environment or leaving your VM and DLP helps you do all of that once you on board your Cloud PCS or avd desktops on it and now let's talk about the secure access category the big highlight that I want to do there is key logger detection with Microsoft Defender we ensured that we can now detect key loggers which has been a common ask from all of our customers we're also working on encrypting keystrokes but the detection mechanisms is already available for you to use today thanks bavia great to have you on the show and and great announcements definitely the security ones and GPU might my favorite ones personally hey how can people stay in touch with you yeah LinkedIn would be the best approach look up Pavia Chopra and I would be happy to connect thanks bavia and now the last section of this episode is super exciting as well with Tristan so hi Tristan how are you doing I'm fantastic good to see you brinko can you explain a little bit what your role and your responsibilities in Microsoft are yeah um I've been at Microsoft for about 18 years I'm now responsible for Enterprise government businesses and products across Windows 365 as your virtual desktop and REM desktop Services um so I think you've had quite a few people from my team actually on the podcast before I think this is also my my first time you've actually invited my PR off so what took so long yeah I don't know um no excuses for that right now Tristan but I'm super glad you you are here right now and I also are super glad and excited about the cool demos you prepared so can you can you share a little bit what we did on the avd side in terms of cool new stuff yeah and I want to say you know like I say my team has so much stuff going on it's hard really to to hit everything um we have a bunch of stuff going on with FS Logics appach making these things more flexible easy to publish easy to update easy to monitor um we're working on a bunch of updates with host pool and and session host management just making the whole management experience a lot easier for ABD um so I will just start with uh kind of showing a couple things that are a little bit more visual that you can see so the first thing here I just want to show is that we are uh gaing our our autoscaling plan support for personal desktops and if you do avd management this is really big because you are responsible for the bill at the end of the day uh and so when you have compute and storage running um you are going to be paying that at the end of the month and so we have all these flexible options that you can play with about when your VMS get shut down at the end of the day how you schedule them to turn on before users come uh get back online the next day and as you can see here we have a couple choices for if you want to fully shut them down or hibernate them which is in in preview uh for a little bit longer but the actual ability to shut down and turn back on being able to auto start these machines when they're they're turned off this is all GA as of now this is great great to hear and very uh very good for like building business cases and cost savings as well um what are we doing on the Azure stack HCI site there's something happening there too right yeah it's a good question I mean it's maybe one of the more common questions I get is you've been in preview with Azure HCI for a while what's happening there and so the thing that we just announced that night is that now you can actually select a back HCI just like any other VM location in the Azure portal um so this is still in preview it's a little bit easier to use now a different easier interface and then we're tracking the HCI release for 23 H2 and this is targeting q1 of next calendar year so somewhere between January and March of next year we expect to be able to GA this entire Azure stack HCI support this is great news because I know like this has been a long awaited feature from customers so great news and great to hear the data as well being uh being confirmed there so switching from avd to Windows 365 what are we doing with InTune Suite it's a great question break off and it's good to remind everyone that all the Investments that are made into InTune automatically apply to Windows 365 so this includes options like the InTune Suite where you get premium access to features like remote help uh EPM and so one of the things uh we just announced is a official support for EPM along with remote help so again you know so much more Mantra with Windows 365 is manage it just the same as you would with a physical PC you can do the same with a cloud PC and so we've continued to live up to that promise here you're very good in terms of security as well in terms of ser trust models with Cloud PCS and InTune suite and EPM and remote help so great news to hear this but what are we doing in endpoint analytics for connectivity monitoring and search in terms of enhancements yeah it's a continued big investment for us across the team with Windows 365 one of the things that is different about uh PCS from physical PCS is we need to make sure that users can always connect you know this is like losing access to your keyboard and mouse when you're using a PC so you have to have this so we can we continue to try to make this easy to do and automated and kind of sens like as much as possible we already have reports out which show you at any point in time which Cloud PCS can be connected to and if not why not and the thing that we're about to roll out next is some of these alerting capabilities so you can go pre-configure your tenant and say if there's some threshold of cloud PCS that are not connectable you can't connect to them regardless of why let me know right away send me an email send me an alert in the console so this kind of gives you this end to end workload for knowing right when users can't connect and then being able to get closer to the report and the actions you can take to mitigate that situation yeah and then the last one where I'm very excited about is like integrating with AI inside the uh winess 365 and inun um yeah portal as part of EA as well so can you shed some light on that while we do there yeah we're super excited about it too obviously all of Microsoft and the industry is excited about Ai and so we see a lot of very valuable practical things that we can do with Windows 355 and so this is kind of one of our first forays into to this we're not exactly sure what we're going to call it here you see in this demo I'm going to show you uh Cloud PC recommendations and you can see how smart we can get with all the data we have about how to advise you to optimize your deployment you know monitoring the users that are not using the right siiz Cloud PC or maybe not even using them as much as You' like you can move your users and your Cloud PCS around to really optimize your deployment um instead of doing the demo myself Ben on my team did this perfect recording and he has such a cool voice and so I wanted you just to see it directly from him so check this out this is an overview of cloud PC recommendations an AI powered feature for Windows 365 that's designed to allow you to optimize the performance and the total cost of ownership of cloud PCS the idea is to try and identify devices that are right sized here shown in green which means that they have the ideal resource configuration and activity for a user or in contrast where they might be undersized here shown in red meaning that the device does not have the resources that a user might need to do their day-to-day activities which could mean they have a poor enduser experience application issues or other problems whether a device might be oversized shown in Orange which means that a device actually has more resources than a user might need and you have the option of downsizing that device in order to have some cost savings finally some devices may be underutilized which means that they may be aren't interacted with very frequently or in some cases simply aren't logged into at all and those licenses can be reclaimed I have a few different mechanisms that I can use to view this information I have the option to view this by device which in this case will actually break out each individual Cloud PC what category it falls into and really critically what recommended size we think that device should be if it happens to be undersized or oversized I also have the option to view that by model which in this case allows me to start getting insights into whether certain device sizes just aren't quite right for my environment so in this case I've got a large number of two vcpu Cloud PCS that are undersized and users may not be getting the best experience so in my environment I may want to choose a 4V CPU configuration as my Baseline moving forward but Cloud PC recommendations are an aid driven mechanism that helps you pinpoint real actionable information that you can use to resize or reclaim licenses to balance performance and total cost of ownership for Windows 365 thanks TR super excited about the AI Integrations here so St job from the team get getting this all together so how can people stay in touch with you if they want to learn more or provide feedback directly to you yeah LinkedIn is probably the best for me at Tristan Scott feel free to shoot me a message I'll post there occasionally too if you want to follow me well thanks Tristan thank you brof I hope it's not too long until I see you again so thanks folks for being such an amazing guest and this great interview I learned a ton and I bet customers would like all those new features that we worked on for the last six to 12 months and with that I would like to thank you for watching if you're a new guest on this show please go to aka. Winners inthe Cloud to see all the previous episodes as well and we hope to see you back for the next episode because we will have an episode about Windows 365 and in Suite so very exciting topic so hope to see you [Music] there
2023-11-26 11:45
