Overview of desktop images for Windows 365 Cloud PC

The Desktop Images module allows you to manage desktop images in your Nerdio Manager customer accounts. You can create desktop images that are used only for AVD desktops or for both AVD desktops and Windows 365 Cloud PCs. This article describes how to create and manage images for Windows 365 Cloud PCs.

To create a Windows 365 Cloud PC for a user, Microsoft needs a template to create the Cloud PC from. This template is called a desktop image. It must be specified in a Windows 365 Cloud PC provisioning policy. Every provisioning policy brings together a network connection and, optionally, a group to tell Microsoft how to Entra ID join or Hybrid Entra join a Windows 365 Cloud PC that it is provisioning from the desktop image.

A Cloud PC-ready desktop image functions similar to the traditional AVD-only desktop image. For more details, see Overview of desktop images.

Companion video

Create Cloud PC-ready desktop images

Cloud PC-ready desktop images are images whose copies are uploaded to Intune and made available for use with Windows 365 Cloud PCs by Microsoft.

To make an Azure image Cloud PC-ready:

• For new desktop images: When adding a new desktop image, either from an Azure VM or from the Azure library, do the following:

  • Azure image: Select a desktop image that includes Cloud PC in its name.

  • Enable for Cloud PCs: Select this option to make the desktop image Cloud PC-ready.

    

• For existing desktop images: For an existing desktop image that is not yet enabled for Cloud PC, from the action menu, select Enable Cloud PC. This uploads a copy of the image to Intune and makes it Cloud PC-ready.

  

  Note: The process of enabling a desktop image to be Cloud PC-ready is fairly complicated and time consuming. It takes a considerable amount of time to upload a copy of the Cloud PC image to Intune and make it available to Microsoft.

Remove a desktop image's Cloud PC readiness

You can remove the desktop image's Cloud PC readiness. For an existing desktop image that is enabled for Cloud PC, from the action menu, select Disable Cloud PC.

Manage Windows 365 Cloud PC desktop images

After updating a desktop image to the latest version of Windows, or performing similar tasks, you must Power off and set as image to bake in the latest changes to the desktop image. For Cloud PC-ready images, Nerdio Manager uploads a new version of the desktop image to Intune and displays the updated version number of the image. For example shown below, you can see that the version number for the image is v2.0.0.