Accessing a RemoteApp from Full Desktop

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John Tokash

I have a scenario presented to me recently, and was curious if anyone could enlighten on the supportability and/or feasibility of the idea that I brewed up.  Has anyone tried, or knows the supportability of running the AVD client, from the full desktop of an AVD Session?

We typically deploy small customer environments to a shared pool (cost effective), and live by desktop images.   Session hosts are always disposable, and 99% of the time, apps cooperate well with this (they can survive sysprep and imaging just fine).   We have a customer with a very antiquated 3rd party app requirement that we do not expect would survive sysprep capture and reimaging with a new name/guid, etc.    So therefore exploring creative options to avoid old school methods like a dedicated RDS Solution just to publish said app only.  So hear me out… 

Deploy our usual shared pool with full desktop like usual.   Then install the Windows Client as an app inside the session hosts.  Deploy a second session host pool (limited to 1 session host that is NOT disposable, but backed up and protected accordingly). The eventual goal being that the users conduct their normal business via the full desktop like normal, and when they need access to this one particular app, it is published from the second host pool.   Hence the need for the Windows App inside the session host. 

I suspect, this would require an additional profile storage location, since the same profile cannot be mounted more than once, but the storage needs would be minimal (likely nowhere near the 100gb min for Azure Files) - so not a huge dent.   No additional licensing (such as for RDS) and very limited additional complexity.

We've done similar with traditional RDS Published apps before without issue, but that was RDS and/or web interface, not the Windows Client, and it wasn't AVD Session Hosts accessing ‘other’ host pools.   It sounds logical, but wanting to sound out the idea before I take the time to throw it together in a lab and see what breaks (or what issues I don't catch right away).

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Dave Stephenson

Definitely not a crazy idea, John.

It's possible and I've seen people do it many times. It's a bit inception like, but it should work just fine.
There are a few potential gotch-ya's to consider though:

  • The Windows App doesn't create shortcuts to the Desktop or Remote Apps in Windows like the Remote Desktop App does so you'll need to train the users on a different process to login to their AVD Desktop, Launch the Windows app, Open their remote app
  • Unless you setup some “unique” Conditional Access rules, they would be able to launch the remote app from their local computer without logging-in to their AVD Desktop

Another potential solution would be to package that app as an App Attach app, and then mount that app to their AVD Desktop when they login. We have some MSIX App Attach functionality in NMM, but Jim Moyle has a great YouTube playlist that goes through how to do it natively from the Azure Portal.

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