Stage Global Images

Overview

The Global Images module of Nerdio Manager provides centralized management for desktop images that can be made available to any or all of your customer accounts. This allows you to make customized images with applications and settings that you re-use in many customer environments, without duplicating effort with each new account. You can change your account's AVD environment by simply re-imaging an existing desktop image. Any host pool where auto-scale is enabled, has a desktop image configured as its template. So whenever you re-image a desktop image, the changes are applied to your host pool as well. In addition, when there is burst capacity defined on your host pool, the auto-scale logic adds new session hosts as per the desktop image configured on your host pool. This situation may at times give rise to several production issues, since the updated desktop images go "live" without being tested.

To solve this issue, we have implemented an Image Staging feature that allows newly created global images to be tested first before being used to create burst capacity as a part of the auto-scale functionality. This option is available only for global images that have been recently refreshed from Azure Marketplace and is usually preferred by highly compliant environments.

How does this work?

Whenever you add a global image from the Azure library, the Nerdio Manager portal allows you to mark it as inactive, so that it is not immediately used by re-imaging or auto-scale logic. All session hosts under the host pool continue to use the old image until you explicitly mark the newly created global image as active. In short, you are keeping the newly added image in "staging environment" for some time to test it out. Once it is thoroughly tested, you can mark it as active and start using it.

Stage a Global Image

These steps enable you to stage a global image.

To stage a global image:

1. At the MSP level, navigate to Global Images.

2. Note that each global image has a Current version.

   

3. Locate the global image you wish to work with.

4. From the action menu, if the global image is powered off, select Set as image. If the global image is powered on, select Power off & set as image.

   

5. Select Stage new image as inactive.

   Notes:

   • See Overview of Global Images for details about the other options.

   • When you select Stage new image as inactive, the Save current image as a backup option is automatically selected.

   • Selecting this option creates the new image but Nerdio Manager keeps it as inactive with an older version number.

6. Select OK.

   The Set as image task starts. You can follow the task's progress in the Global Images Tasks section.

Deploy a Staged Global Image

These steps enable you to deploy a staged global image.

To deploy a staged global image:

1. At the MSP level, navigate to Global Images.

2. Locate the global image you wish to work with.

3. From the action menu select Activate staged image.

   

4. Select Save current image version as a backup.

5. Select OK.

   Note: In the example shown above, the staged version (2.0.0) is now the active version. The older version (1.0.0) is no longer shown on the Global Images page.