Power VM on Connect

1 vote

Published a day ago

Hi All,

We had our server fleet running 24x7 in Azure so these were accessible but some of them very rarely used, so we're racking up quite a bill. So I started to transition these to an Azure Virtual Desktop host pool with a scaling plan that powers down the VM's when not in use and enabled Power On Connect so they will start up on a connection request.

This works great when published natively but I cannot trigger this via RDM - support says this capability doesn't exist, so wondering if this is a feature we would look at enabling - like a pre-connect command, or setting up a managed identity that could be authorised for Power On Connect.

Thanks,
Dwayne

All Comments (1)

Richard Markiewicz

Published 16 hours ago

Hello Dwayne

Thanks for your post. I don't like to answer a question with more questions, but I need to understand your setup a little better.

The power on connect feature is not an RDP-level feature; Microsoft's client(s) may be talking to Azure using one of their APIs but I think it more likely that this feature is provided by the Azure connection broker. It may be possible to trigger this on our side, or as you said perhaps a pre-connection command that will trigger it out-of-band.

But first I have to ask how you have your hosts set up in RDM? Historically we don't have a good integration with AVD infrastructure, simply because Microsoft doers not offer third-party integration with their first-party AVD client. We've brought this up with Microsoft several times, but they don't seem to understand why third-party integration is important. So I'm curious what your setup looks like currently - do you import the .rdp files from the Microsoft client? Do you use embedded sessions or external? If you can tell me a little about what you have working currently, it will help drive the direction of power on connect.

Please let me know if something isn't clear

Kind regards,

Richard Markievicz