Setup AVD on Azure Local (Azure Stack HCI) in your (Home)Lab – Part 2

In the first part of this series, we successfully deployed our Azure Local into our (Home)Lab. In this part, we will deploy the first AVD Hosts onto our Azure Local.

Prerequisites

VM IMAGES

First thing, we will add to our Azure Local are some Images, that we will use later in our Host Pool(s). To do that, we will go into VM Images on our Azure Local:

I will add the Images from the Azure Marketplace, as I currently have no custom images available:

First Image, that I will add is a Windows 11 Multi Session Host Image:

And additionally, a “normal” single session Windows 11 Image:

Depending on your Internet Bandwidth and Hardware performance, the download process may take some time:

Network Configuration

While we wait for the Images to get downloaded, we can add our Logical network. The needed config highly depends on your network configuration. To keep it super simple, I will reuse the existing virtual switch that was created during the Azure Local deployment.

For a productive deployment, I would use a separate nic / network for that, but for my home lab, I think it’s ok to use the existing “ConvergedSwitch”:

I will go with DHCP:

Deploy Host Pool

Multi Session Host

Now that we have all Prerequisites ready, we can deploy our first AVD Host Pool:

I will start with a Host Pool for our Multi Session Hosts:

And directly add the first MSH VM:

I will also create a Workspace:

To keep it simple, I will start without diagnostics:

And after verification, start the deployment:

And after some time, we should have our first working VM in our Host Pool:

Single Session VM

Next, I will also create a second Host Pool for personal single session VMs:

And again, we will directly add a VM to the pool:

Next, we can register this Host Pool to the workspace we created before:

And again, start the deployment after the validation:

Final configurations

RDP Entra SSO Config

Now that we have deployed our Host Pools, we can make some minor final configurations, and we soon will have a working machine. First thing that I would enable is SSO in the RDP Options of the Host Pool(s):

Additional, I would configure the RDP Consent Group, as I described a while ago: Prevent sign-in consent prompt on AVD or Windows 365 Single Sign On (SSO) – Mike’s MDM Blog

Assignments

In order to use the Machines, we need to assign the Application Group to the users, which should be able to have access:

Access the VM

Finally, we can try to access our VM from e.g. the Windows App in Browser or native:


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