Azure Edge Zones

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Russell Hurren

Microsoft have opened a new Azure Edge Zone in Perth, Western Australia. Currently the round-trip time to the nearest Azure region (Sydney) is 70ms. The new zone supports AVD, but at present we can't deploy session hosts automatically via Nerdio.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-desktop/azure-extended-zones

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Dave Stephenson

Welcome to the community, Russell Hurren 🙂!

Azure Edge Zones seem really cool.
I was looking at the current limitations for Azure Edge Zones with AVD and saw that, depending on your team's Azure abilities, it will take significantly more Azure infrastructure expertise (i.e. FW Appliance, route rules, etc.) to implement.

Would any of these limitations be a roadblock for your internal teams to support?

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Russell Hurren

Thanks Dave

I'm pretty good with networking. I've considered a few options:

  • Public IPs for each session host (I could provision this with Powershell when hosts are created)
  • VM running RouterOS/OPNSense etc to provide NAT. Easily done, not so robust or scalable though.
  • ExpressRoute and route out through my network (probably can't justify yet, but easily done as we scale, we have infrastructure in the same DC as Azure).
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Dave Stephenson

Hmm. Those could work but could quickly become cost prohibitive especially with a public IP per session host or an express route. Not a deal-breaker, per say, just something to keep in-mind.

I can't promise that we can implement Azure Extended Zones anytime soon (because there's a lot of complexities to consider and test (i.e. potential API limitations, Storage Account, Networking/Internet, Azure Compute Gallery Images being deployed to an Extended Zone, etc.)), but we'll see what the wizards in our Product Team can do. 🤓

Out of curiosity, have you used this functionality natively in Azure before?
 

 

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Russell Hurren

I missed your reply, sorry.

I haven't deployed anything to Perth yet. I understand it'll be in General Availability very soon though.
I wish they'd let me deploy Windows 365 in Perth - I get that included with my partner launch benefits.

1-2 public IPs for a multi-session host is no big deal. Add a few more and a VM as a router starts to make more sense.

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