Tag: cloud pc

Categories
Windows 365

Why would you use a Cloud PC?

I’ve been reading a lot of posts lately about the “why” around Cloud PC, why and when you would use a Cloud PC and what the scenarios could be. This inspired me a bit!

The way we often see virtual computers is that “yeah they are great, but this is way too complex for us” or the more common one “we triend that 5 years ago, we won’t go down that route again”.

My idea for this post is to talk a little bit about why you should move to Windows 365 for the bulk of your users and use AVD for those niche implementations where Windows 365 can’t really fulfill your needs today.

Why would you work from a Cloud PC?

Image that you are like me, a consultant, who collaborates with several different customers who all have their own environment. Or maybe you have taken the decision to support Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), which would be a similar scenario for consultants.

When I talk to customers and other people about Windows 365, we often discuss two scenarios:

  • Consultants/part time workers,
  • Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A).

The first one is way more common to be honest since most organisations today have at least some consultants in their team.

If you look at a consultant, they usually work for some kind of company which provides them with a computer which they take with them everywhere they go (I know I do). Since they already have a computer, why give them yet another one to fill their backpack with? Why not use a Cloud PC which they can access from a device of their choice, which you can configure in such a way that information cannot leave the Cloud PC.

Using a Cloud PC, you can give a consultant or employee access to the internal network without them having to install anything on their, by your company, unmanaged device. The device they will work from will be fully managed and you can be sure that you have done everything in your power that you have secured your data.

Working from a Cloud PC isn’t that different from using a physical, since all we do today requires an internet connection anyway. Sure, you get reliant on always having an internet connection (until Windows 365 introduces the offline mode). But let’s face it, we are already reliant on that for collaborating in our daily work, I’m myself never offline unless basically traveling on an airplane.

Environmental impact

There is also another aspect of this, which we might not always talk about, but I find interesting. It’s the fact that getting new computers has a significant impact on the environment, and getting hold of hardware isn’t always that easy nowadays (long lead times).

Using Windows 365 has some environmental benefits compared to physical computers. Firstly, it reduces the amount of energy, water, and resources needed to produce and dispose of physical hardware. Secondly, it optimizes the use of computing resources and reduces energy consumption, which lowers the associated carbon emissions.

However, using virtual desktops needs a reliable internet connection and raises concerns about data privacy and security. Overall, while the environmental impact of using Windows 365 compared to physical computers is complex, cloud-based computing services can reduce the need for physical hardware and use computing resources more efficiently, thus benefiting the environment.

The fact that we can run Cloud PCs on any hardware, this also means that older hardware can be used longer (but be careful using Windows 10 after 14 of October 2025 since it will no longer get patched). There are many ways of making use of older hardware without needing to install Windows on them even. IgelOS is an awesome example of this, and there are many other products like them!

The takeaway

So, what do I think you should take away from this blog post?

Firstly, I think you should seriously consider STOP giving your consultants PCs and have them use Cloud PCs instead. This will save you time and money since you will not have to source computers for them, and it’s not too uncommon that we provide consultants with older hardware which might have reached the end of its lifecycle and might not be too reliant anymore.

There are great examples of this, such as the Swedish manufacturing company Alleima who in a Microsoft customer case describes how they look at this. There is also another Swedish example with the energy company Kraftringen who also went down the same path with using Windows 365 for temporary workers.

Secondly, let’s face it. The consultant already has one computer which they bring wherever they go. Why give them yet another computer they need to fit into their already filled up backpack? And when the assignment is over, you have the hassle of getting that computer back, especially if you have used resources which are not local to your area. Then it needs to be shipped or a visit to the office planned and coordinated.

Using a Cloud PC, you can have a consultant up and running within a few hours, without having to get any kind of hardware to them!

But as always, there are of course instances where a physical machine is required, but I would say that you could solve the consultant situation 80-90% of the time! 😊

Categories
Windows 365

Running Hyper-V on a Cloud PC

This is the second version of this post, since the original one got lost in a recovery since my blog went down.

One thing that many IT pros tend to use a lot is virtual machines in e.g., Hyper-V, for testing or running different things. That is also one excellent advantage of having a physical computer, that possibility to run multiple virtual machines (VM) locally. However, what if you use a Cloud PC and want to run local VMs?

This has been possible since a while back if you were running the fancier SKUs of Windows 365 (the 8 vCPU one), but that is also combined with a higher cost. You could enable the hypervisor on the Cloud PC and run Hyper-V.

However, since February you can run Hyper-V on one of the “lower” SKUs of Windows 365, the 4 vCPU version. This is a fantastic addition to the value Windows 365 brings, since you don’t have to get the fanciest version, you can stick to a more resonable machine.

Enabling Hyper-V

Enabling Hyper-V on a Cloud PC isn’t much different from a physical client. You need to have local admin privileges on the machine, either through given rights or a secondary account. Then search the start menu for “Turn Windows features on or off” and open the dialogue.

Look for Hyper-V in the list of features, select it and then press OK to close the dialogue.

Once you have done this, you will be asked to restart your machine to enable the new Windows features. So go ahead and restart the machine directly or do it later if you need to save any work you have open.

If you want to learn more about the different ways you can enable Hyper-V, check this Microsoft article out, since there are other ways than clicking through the interface Enable Hyper-V on Windows 10 | Microsoft Learn.

Run Hyper-V on your Cloud PC

Just like with any other computer, once the Hyper-V feature has been enabled and you have restarted your machine, you can now go ahead and start the Hyper-V Manager. One thing to keep in mind is that you need to start Hyper-V in an elevated context, otherwise you will not be able to connect to your local machine as a server.

From here you can create your virtual machines using either your own image or using the quick create feature. So, this is nothing different from running Hyper-V on a physical client!

Conclusion

Having the opportunity to utilize Hyper-V, or other types of local virtual machines, can be a crucial feature for many IT Pros. Looking at how Windows 365 is being adopted at least on the Swedish market, we see a lot of consultants and temporary workers using this as their “customer computer”. Since you could now use Hyper-V on even that computer, this means that you no longer need to rely on having test environments on your local machine, opening the possibility to work from more types of devices while still being able to perform task from a more powerful computer.

For me, working as a consultant and mostly utilizing Cloud PCs when working with my customers, this opens new possibilities to run tests in the customers environment in a much simpler way.

Categories
Intune Windows 365

Can we build a Windows 365 kiosk for shared use?

Once every now and then you get one of those weird and maybe a bad ideas and ask yourself:

“What if I have a Windows 10 computer which cannot run Windows 11, but I really want to run Windows 11 on it in a supported way?“

That was what I asked myself when realizing my old Surface Laptop (first generation) does not support Windows 11.

Putting this in maybe a more real-life like scenario “we have some old hardware and Windows 365. We want to keep using the hardware for a few more years but run Windows 11” or something like that.

This gave me an idea. Can we create a kiosk that runs the Windows 365 app only on a managed Windows 10 computer? And to make it more special, let’s make it as a shared device so that I get MY Cloud PC and you get YOUR Cloud PC! 😊

Since Windows 365 Boot is not coming to Windows 10, we need another solution. This solution could be using kiosk mode and shared mode for Windows.

Pre-reqs

What do we need for this to work?

  • Intune managed Windows 10 computer
  • Computer registered for Windows Autopilot
  • Self-deploying deployment profile for Windows Autopilot
  • Shared device policy
  • Windows 365 license of some sort
  • All other licenses required to use Intune
  • The Remote Desktop application installed on a device
  • An Azure AD group containing out kiosk PCs

And that is about it.

My thought is to use the old school ShellLauncher method for this, not the fancy assigned app setup since we can make this more dynamic if we want to re-purpose this for another application. This means that we could also use Win32 applications and not only UWP apps.

Using the ShellLauncher method in Intune has gotten really easy, it’s just one custom policy and we are set.

Creating the ShellLauncher script

When looking around for a good source, and inspiration, for this setup I came across this post by Michael Niehaus which is really good and even provides a sample script we can use (why re-invent the wheel?).

Using the script example in the blog above, I came up with this script which you can download from my Github repo.

Basically, what you need to update, is the <Shell> section of this part to the path for your application (Win32) or the AUMID (UWP). In this case, the Windows 365 app for Windows 10 which is a UWP app (as stated in the V2:AppType attribute).

If the remote desktop session is closed, the application will restart.

Creating the ShellLauncher policy

For this, we need to create a custom policy in Intune.

First step is to go to Intune (https://endpoint.microsoft.com) and navigate to Devices > Windows > Configuration profiles and select “+ Create profile“. Select Windows 10 and later as platform, Template as profile type and then the Custom template.

Next, we will give our profile a good name so that we know what the profile does. This should be based on your name standard and naming convention for policies. Then hit next at the bottom of the window.

On the “Configuration settings” tab, select “Add” and give the configuration a name (e.g., ShellLauncher V2). As OMA-URI, enter:

./Device/Vendor/MSFT/AssignedAccess/ShellLauncher

As data type, select “String (XML file)” and upload your XML file. When this is completed, press Save at the bottom of the screen.

You will now see that your setting has been added as a row to this configuration setting and you can press Next at the bottom of the screen.

On the Assignment tab, select the group where you have put you targeted kiosk devices and press Next at the bottom of the screen.

You can skip the “Applicability rules” tab and jump straight to the “Review + create” tab to view a summary of your configuration.

Once you have reviewed your settings, you can press Create and your profile will be created.

Shared device policy

The other profile we need to create is a profile for Shared device. This is done by going to Devices > Windows > Configuration profiles and select “+ Create profile“. Select “Windows 10 and later” as platform, “Templates” as Profile type and find and select “Shared multi-user device” and click create.

Give your profile a name, I will call mine “Win365 Shared Kiosk“. When you have given your profile a name, press next.

On the Configuration settings tab, enable the Shared PC mode and add the settings you need based on your requirements. I will use Domain as Guest account type to ensure that only users from my organization will be allowed to sign in. I will also add some additional settings as you can see from the screen. When you have added your settings, hit next.

Assign your policy to the group you created and used for the ShellLauncher policy and press next.

On the last step, review your settings and click create!

Self-deploying enrollment profile

To have this as a zero-touch installation, which would require zero input from an IT person, we can use the self-deploying deployment profile in Windows Autopilot, which means that we need to create a new profile.

In Intune, head to Devices > Windows > Windows Enrollment > Deployment profiles and select “+ Create profile” and select Windows PC.

First step is as always to give you profile a name, I will call mine “Self deployed Kiosk” and then press next.

On the next tab, select “Self-Deploying (preview)” as Deployment mode. You will then see that almost all fields are grayed out. You can leave all values as default, or choose to change the Language, if keyboard should be automatically configured and if a name template should be used.

Notice: If you are to use this on a virtual machine, you will need to use the user-driver deployment mode since self-deploying requires physical hardware.

For this demo, I will leave everything set to default and press next.

The next step is to set assignments, we will select the Azure AD group we created for the policy for this, but you could also use another group. The important part is that the device is in this group.

Press next and you will end up on the review + create tab where you can review your settings before pressing create.

Once the profile is created, it will take around 15 minutes or so for the enrollment profile to be applied to your device, given that it’s not already included in another active assignment. If that is the case, you need to either add an exclusion group or remove it from the other group before the profile will be assigned.

If you navigate to Devices > Windows > Windows Enrollment > Devices you can look at your device and make sure the correct enrollment profile is assigned.

Deploying our kiosk

This is where the fun begins. Let’s deploy our kiosk to our device!

My device needed to be reset, since it’s already managed by Intune, I can simply just use the wipe command and the device will reset. Since I’ve already added it to the target group for my deployment profile, the enrollment will kick off automatically once the device has been reset. However, if you are connecting using Wi-Fi, you will need to select region, keyboard and Wi-Fi network.

Once the Windows Autopilot enrollment process has completed, my Windows 365 kiosk device is ready, and I can now only run the Windows 365 app on my device.

NOTICE!

There is a big flaw in this design at the moment, and that is the fact that we cannot deploy the W365 application during the ESP at this stage, this means that we need to ensure that the application is installed BEFORE we apply the kiosk profile. If and when we can install the application from the “new store” during ESP, this will not be an issue.

This means that we currently need to wait until the W365 app has been deployed before we assign our kiosk profile.

Additional reading:

Awesome post by a fellow W365 MVP Dominiek: Windows 11 Kiosk With The Windows 365 App – techlab.blog

Post by Michael Niehaus how to create a kiosk using ShellLauncher: Creating a kiosk or digital sign using Windows Autopilot, Intune, and Edge (Chromium) – Out of Office Hours (oofhours.com)

Categories
Windows 365

Deploying Cloud PCs in different regions

Windows 365 and Cloud PCs are as you know PCs running in Azure somewhere. But what if you want to control this “somewhere” and pinpoint the region they are running in? You might have noticed that spinning up a Cloud PC in e.g., Western Europe gives you Google and all web-based things in Dutch. This isn’t too convenient for the end-users who doesn’t speak Dutch. So, let’s try to address that and give a more “local” experience.

I’m thinking of putting users in a Windows 365 region as close as possible to them, hopefully even within the same country. And to top it off, let’s provide them with a Windows experience in their local language, just for the sake of it.

How can we achieve this?

Well, we need two things, we need a provisioning profile per country and an Azure AD group which has been populated with users for each country. The region selected in the network for Windows 365 decides in which region the Cloud PC is hosted.

Setting up Azure AD groups

There are as many ways to do this as there are IT pros, but I decided to make this easy and just look at three things for my groups, attributes that I know all my users have.

What I decided to look at is that:

  • The account is enabled
  • Usage location for the user is set to Sweden
  • And the country for the user is set to Sweden

That got me the following query for my dynamic group.

(user.accountEnabled -eq True) and (user.usageLocation -eq "SE") and (user. Country -eq "Sweden")

To create a new group, head to Groups in the Intune portal and create a new group by pressing “New group“.

Give your group a name, in my case I’ve called it “All users Sweden” since we will gather all Swedish users in this group. Also make sure to set “Membership type” to Dynamic User so that we can create a query to automatically populate the group based on user attributes.

Add your query to your group by pressing “Add dynamic query” and enter your rule. You can take my example and modify it if you like, copy the rule syntax above and press “Edit” on the rule syntax windows and paste it there. This will populate the fields for you, and you can modify them to suit your needs. Or create your own! Keep in mind that the usage location uses the two-letter country code e.g., Sweden is SE, Norway is NO, Netherlands is NL, USA is US.

Press Save when you have created, and validated, your rule and press Create.

We have now successfully created a dynamic group which will be populated with all active accounts which has their country and usage location set to Sweden.

Creating provisioning policies

Now that we have our groups, we want to put them to effective use. Let’s head into the Windows 365 pane in Microsoft Intune by navigating to Devices > Windows 365 and selecting the “Provisioning policies” tab. To create a new policy, click the “+ Create policy” button on the ribbon.

First off, as always, we will give our policy a name, in my case I’m giving it a name indicating that this is a Windows 11 image, Azure AD joined and running on Microsoft hosted network. And this is for my Swedish users.

The next step is to select what kind of join type you will use and which network. In this example, I will use Azure AD join and using the Microsoft hosted network. The dreadful thing about using Sweden as an example here is that we don’t have Windows 365 in Sweden Central, so we will use the next best thing. Norway East!

You can do this for Azure v-nets, but then you need to set the region stuff when setting up the Azure v-net. There is a limit to the amount of how many Azure Network Connections (ANC) you can define per tenant, you can find out more here. If you know that you have multiple locations and want to put the service as close as possible to the end-user, it’s much easier to use the Microsoft hosted network.

The next step is to select an image, I will go with a gallery Windows 11 image since this will reduce the amount of maintenance I need to do since Microsoft is curating the image. Press next when you have selected your image.

Next, we will configure language and region settings. Like I said, the ambition here is to provide the Windows 365 experience in the user’s local language. So, for this I will select Swedish for this policy.

In this section, you can also choose to opt-in to Windows Autopatch straight away if you have this enabled in your tenant. If you do not wish to do so, just leave it to the default value. But since I have it activated in my tenant, I will add this as well and then press next.

The next step is to assign this policy to our group created in the first part. If you wish, you can add multiple groups to the same provisioning profile. But I only have one which will be used for this one, so I will select my group with all Swedish users and press next.

Final step is to review the settings we have selected and then press “Create“.

Conclusion

Now when a Windows 365 license is assigned to a user, their Cloud PC will be provisioned in the region based on which provisioning policy they are assigned to using our dynamic Azure AD group.

The groups don’t need to be dynamic and you could just as easily accomplish this using assigned groups. Also, you could utilize this setup to also include e.g., your developers who need access to a specific Azure v-net for example. In this case you would have provisioning profiles connected to those networks instead of the Microsoft hosted network, giving those users access to that network.

Categories
Windows 365

Different ways of accessing a Cloud PC

There are a few ways you can access your Cloud PC. You probably have your favorite way to access your Cloud PC, but I though I would go through them all and the benefits with each.

Microsoft has also announced an upcoming Windows 11 feature called Windows 365 Switch which will be a native Windows 365 app in Windows 11. I will not cover that in this post since it’s yet to be released at the time of this blogpost.

Browser

Connecting to your Cloud PC through the browser is in my humble opinion the coolest way, and really convenient since you can then access your computer from what ever device you are using without any issues (as long as the browser is a modern browser like Edge, Chrome, Safari, or Firefox). Okay, not any device, but Windows-, macOS-, ChromeOS-, or Linux-based device.

You access the Windows 365 service through https://windows365.microsoft.com and sign in with your account.

In this portal, you will see all Cloud PCs assigned to you.

To connect to the Cloud PC, you simply press “Open in browser” and the Cloud PC will open in a new tab.

You can also perform some remote tasks on the Cloud PC such as restart, restore, rename or troubleshoot. Or see System information.

The restart is exactly what it sounds like, you will remotely restart your Cloud PC. Restore can be used to go back to a previous point in time (I cover that in this blogpost).

Rename option will allow you to give your Cloud PC a new friendly name instead of the generated name.

If you as an end-user are experiencing issues with connecting to your Cloud PC, you can use Troubleshoot to see what’s causing the issues. It will check that the service is healthy and that there aren’t any connectivity issues.

If you click the “System information”, you will see some details about your Cloud PC such as device name and license.

Remote Desktop app

Working with your Cloud PC everyday, I would say that this is the best option to connect.

Simply download the Remote Desktop app from Microsoft for your desired operating system. For Windows I would suggest to use the desktop version and not the Microsoft Store version, the desktop version works a little bit smoother in my experience.

One thing that is good to keep in mind is that if you are using macOS, you cannot currently have multiple accounts in the Remote Desktop app.

When you have downloaded and installed the application and start it for the first time, you will be asked to sign in. Sign in with you account and the resources you have assigned to you will be added. These could be Windows 365 resources, but also Azure Virtual Desktop resources and published apps.

As you can see by the picture, running the app in Windows I can have multiple accounts and resources in the same place, giving me easy access to several environment.

To launch the Cloud PC, I simply dubble click on the computer icon, provide my credentials and I’m signed in.

I can choose to run this in a full screen experience or a windowed experience depending on my personal preferences.

Using the Remote Desktop app, you don’t get all the remote features as you do in the web-portal, but you have easier access to your Cloud PC on a daily basis.

Mobile app

Lastly, mobile app. There is a Remote Desktop app available for iPhone/iPad and Android devices which can be used to connect to your Cloud PC. I will show some screen shots from and iPhone which is maybe not the smoothest way to work with the Cloud PC due to the screen size. For this, and iPad would be a much better option.

To connect, click the + sign at the top right corner and select “Add workspace“. You will need to enter the subscription URL found here and then sign in with your account. One thing to keep in mind with the mobile app is that you can only have one account associated with the workspace, so no support for multiple accounts.

Once you have signed in, you will see all resources which are assigned to this account.

To connect, simply tap on the computer you which to connect to and enter your credentials when asked to and you will be connected to your Cloud PC.

You can now use your Cloud PC from your mobile device, and keep working where you left your desktop! This is a great option when you have to check something on the go, to simply just connect to your Cloud PC.

Feature vice, the mobile app is pretty limited but you can easily connect to your desktop. If you have a larger screen, the experience will be better so an iPad or Android tablet with a keyboard would be ideal even though it works surprisingly well using an iPhone as you can zoom in and out if needed.

Categories
Windows 365

Restore a Cloud PC

One pretty neat feature with virtual clients is that you can have restore-points. If you have ever used Hyper-V, you have probably used or seen the checkpoints which you could use to go back to a previous state. This kind of feature is available in other virtualization platforms as well, but Hyper-V is the one I’m familiar with. Citrix, being an old player in the VDI game, also offers this feature.

The restore point option is now also available for Windows 365 and your Cloud PC. Meaning that if you mess something up or manage to delete something really important you had stored locally, you can roll your device back to a previous state. Please be aware that this is stilla preview feature, so the final feature might not be the exact same things as shown in this post.

You can restore either as an admin, or have your end-user do the action. To allow your end-users to do this, you need to configure this setting.

If you enable this for your users, they can restore on a much tighter intervall than you can as an admin. You as an admin have 12 hour restore points, but you can configure for your end-users to be able to configure to have restore points every 4 hours.

Of course, if a backup is restored from a restore point, any data stored on the Cloud PC between the current time and restore point time will be lost.

Setting up user initiated restore

To configure the restore point service, navigate to Devices > Windows 365 and select the User Settings tab.

Press “+ Add” and give your profile a name.

In the “Point in time restore service” part of the profile, check the check-box for “Allow user to initiate restore service” and then select the frequency for your restore points.

Hit Next and assign your profile to a group of users, I’m assigning it to the group I’m using for my provisioning profile.

Press next to review your settings and than create the profile.

The user restore point service will only be available to users included in the group you have assigned the profile to.

Restoring as an admin

As an admin, you can restore Cloud PCs on a 12 hour interval. You can restore the Cloud PC by going to Devices > Windows > Windows devices and find your Cloud PC.

Once looking at the device, you can choose “Restore (preview)” from the ribbon and it will show you all available store points.

Once you click “Select” and confirm that you want to restore, the restore is initiated. If you look under Devices > Windows 365 and the All Cloud PCs tab, you will see that restore is in progress.

Restoring as an end-user

To restore my Cloud PC as an end-user, I need to brows to the Windows 365 portal, windows365.microsoft.com and sign in.

Once signed in, I will see my assigned Cloud PCs.

To initiate a restore, I simply click the gear icon on the Cloud PC I want to restore and select “Restore (preview)“.

Once I click that, I get this screen telling me as an end-user what will happen and I need to confirm that I really want to restore and then select which point.

Once I’ve clicked restore the Cloud PC will get a banner saying “Restoring Cloud PC” and which indicates that the process has started. I will see the same thing if a administrator has initiated a restore for me as well.

Once the restore has completed, my Cloud PC is ready to use again and will contain the same data as it did at the point in time of the restore point I selected.

Categories
Windows 365

Upgrading your Windows 365 machine

Updated on the 25 of September 2022 due to new functionality released to downgrade Cloud PCs

As you might know, the size of a Cloud PC is based on the license you have purchased and assigned to a user. However, sometimes you might assign a too small machine for a user which is causing performance issues for them. It could also be the other way around, that the user has a too powerful machine, which drives an increased cost for your organisation.

How your Cloud PC is performing is measured and presented to you under Reports > Endpoint Analytics in the Microsoft Endpoint Manager admin center (MEM). The report called Resource performance will show you how your Cloud PCs are performing, and if you need to upgrade any of them. (Note that it will take up to 24 hours before you can see data on your Cloud PC)

As you can see, the top two machines have a very low performance score, and if you look at the individual machines they have different needs for an upgrade, one needs more RAM and the other a better CPU.

There are however two caveats to re-sizing a machine.

  1. You can upgrade or downgrade (only upgrade, not downgrade)
  2. If you are using group-based licensing, this does not work
  3. You can not resize Azure AD joined Cloud PCs

The benefit to resizing a Cloud PC compared to just assigning a larger license to the user is that the Cloud PC will remain, just the specification will be upgraded. So all user data is preserved, however, the user will get kicked out of the session while the resizing is happening.

Resize a Cloud PC

Resizing a machine is really simple, you simply navigate to the device in MEM and click the “Resize (preview)” button in the ribbon.

When you have clicked this button, a fly-out menu will open to the left showing you the different sizes. You will be able to see all sizes, but you can only select and apply the size that you have licenses for, so if you select a size you don’t have licenses for it will show an error message as in the picture below and you cannot continue.

You can upgrade vCPU, RAM, and disk space. However, you are limited to only downgrading vCPU and RAM, disk space will not be possible to decrease.

When you have selected the new license through the resizing portal and clicked Resize, the machine will re-provision itself which will take a while.

Once the machine has been reprovisioned, you will notice that you have the same stuff on your Cloud PC as before the resizing but with a different configuration.

Categories
Windows 365

Get started with Windows 365 Enterprise

So you have decided to get going with Windows 365 Enterprise? There are a few steps we need to take care of before you can start consuming the future!

What you will need:

  • Windows 365 licenses
  • Microsoft Endpoint Manager
  • Microsoft 365 licenses of some sort
  • An Azure subscription if you want to use an Azure V-net and not the Microsoft hosted network – optional

Windows 365 is a great way to get started with virtual clients, and it’s actually pretty simple to get going and administrate compared to Azure Virtual Desktop.

Windows 365 licenses

The first thing you need to take care of is obtaining Windows 365 licenses through your licensing partner or where you usually get your licenses. I will leave that one up to you!

There are several different licenses for Windows 365, and there is also a business version that I will not cover in this blog post.

Windows 365 licensing is based on what “size” of a machine you want, basically how many CPUs, the amount of RAM memory, and disk size. As I’m writing this, there are 3 different SKUs of CPUs you can select from (2, 4, and 8). In each SKU of CPUs, there are a few different options in RAM memory and disk size as you can see in the picture below. There is also actually a 1 vCPU version, but that one does not support Windows 11 so I wouldn’t recommend getting that one.

Source: Windows 365 Plans and Pricing | Microsoft

Selecting the correct size of the machine might be a little bit tricky, but Microsoft has actually created a simple cheat sheet you can use to get a feeling of what license to buy which you can find here Windows 365 size recommendations | Microsoft Docs. It’s actually a great guide to get a sense of what size to choose.

One great thing with Windows 365 is that you can upgrade the machines by upgrading the license assigned to the user. However, this does not work if you are using group-based licensing to assign licenses.

Licenses are assigned the same way you assign other Microsoft 365 licenses, either through the Microsoft 365 Admin center or the Azure AD, I will cover this further down

Microsoft Endpoint Manager setup

In Microsoft Endpoint Manager, navigate to Devices > Windows 365 which has now been enabled for you since you have purchased licenses.

To get going with a really basic setup using Azure AD joined and Microsoft hosted network, you only need to create a Provisioning policy and then you are ready.

Click on the Provisioning policies tab and select “+ Create policy”.

On the General step, give your policy a name and select which join type you want, in this example, I will use the Azure AD join and use a Microsoft Hosted network in Western Europe. Please do notice that Azure AD join is still in preview.

When you press next, you will get to select what image you will use. You can either use a gallery image or a custom image, and I will in this example use a gallery image by selecting Gallery image in the drop-down menu and then pressing select. I then get a list of all the available images in the gallery, and also the recommended size/license for each image. I select the image I want, in this case, the Windows 11 image, and press select followed by next.

The next step is to select the region and language for your machine. The default selection is English (United States). In this example, we will leave that to English and press next.

The next step is to assign this to a group of users. I’ve created an Azure AD group which I will assign this to called Windows 365 user, which I will use for my users located in Western Europe since my provisioning policy is creating a Cloud PC in the Western Europe Azure region.

After pressing next we can now review our settings and press Create.

Assigning licenses

There are a few ways of assigning licenses to a user, but in this instance, I will do this from within Microsoft Endpoint Manager.

Search and find the user you want to assign a license to by going to Users > All users on the left side navigation three.

When you have found your user, click on their name then select Licenses to see what licenses they have assigned.

By selecting “+ Assignments” we can add or remove licenses from the user. In this case, we want to add our Windows 365 license which you do by checking the checkbox next to the license, then pressing Save.

You have now successfully assigned a Windows 365 license to your user!

Make sure your user is a member of your provisioning policy group which we selected earlier. When you head back to Devices > Windows 365 and select the All Cloud PCs tab you can see that the provisioning process has started.

Assign configuration profiles and compliance policies

While we are waiting for our Cloud PCs to be provisioned, this usually takes a while, we can go ahead and make sure that we are assigning our configuration policies towards the Cloud PCs. We can either create new ones, specifically for the Cloud PCs, or reuse our existing ones. Since in this case, I’m treating a Cloud PC as any other PC, I will reuse the profiles I already have created for my physical PCs.

If you are assigning configuration profiles and compliance policies towards “All devices” you do not need to do anything. If you are using filters, you need to update your filters to also include Windows 365.

The first thing we need to do is to create a device group that dynamically adds our Cloud PCs by going to Groups in the left side menu and creating a new dynamic group.

We want to add a query looking for devices where the Device model contains “Cloud PC Enterprise”.

The query could look like this:

(device.deviceModel -contains "Cloud PC Enterprise")

When you have added your rule. Save the group and let’s head over to Devices > Windows and add that group to our configuration profiles and compliance policies where we target devices. We can also assign any applications which we deploy to devices using this group.

Connect to your Cloud PC

The easiest way to connect to your Cloud PC is to browse to https://windows365.microsoft.com and sign in with your user.

You can either connect to your VDI directly from the browser, which is a pretty cool experience, by clicking “Open in browser” on the Cloud PC.

You can also download the Remote Desktop app and add the Cloud PC in there. There is a link in the Windows 365 portal to download the application and how to add the Cloud PC.