Dieter Kempeneers

Maintenance windows are a feature of Windows 365 that allow you to schedule a time period when your cloud PCs will be updated and resized automatically. This helps you to keep your cloud PCs secure and optimized without disrupting your work or productivity. You can configure the frequency, duration, and start time of the maintenance windows, as well as the notification settings to inform your users about the upcoming changes.

Configuring a maintenance window

In comparison with all other setting of Windows 365, Maintenance Windows are not located in the default Windows 365 blade within Intune, they are located in the Tenant Admin where you can just create a schedule that you can assign to a device based group. The Maintenance Window will always be triggered based on the in-guest timezone of the Cloud PC itself.

This means that you can have multiple provisioning policies across multiple regions and cover them all with a single maintenance policy.

Requirements

To be able to use the maintenance window for the automatic resizing the new license needs to be available in the tenant. If you’re downsizing a user’s Cloud PC, options with lower storage will also be grayed out. It’s best to create a seperate security group for the new SKU and add the user to that group as well. Make sure the group is assigned to the provisioning policy that created the initial Cloud PC.

Currently it’s not supported to have a user being member of multiple provisioning policies using the same SKU. _{but there are workarounds.}

Managing Expectations

One of the benefits of Maintenance Windows is that they allow you to resize your Cloud PCs without disrupting the user experience. You can configure a maintenance window to run at a specific time and frequency, and select the target size for your Cloud PCs.

The resizing process will only affect the Cloud PCs that are not in use during the maintenance window. If a Cloud PC is in use, it will not be resized until the next maintenance window.

Maintenance Windows do not report on the success or failure of remote actions and don’t cover:

• Service maintenance
• Windows updates,
• Intune sync,
• Windows updates,

Currently only the resize process is supported as part of the maintenance window.

Creating a Maintenance Window

To access the maintenance windows feature, go to the Cloud PC blade in the Windows 365 admin center, and select Maintenance windows from the left menu.

You can easily create a maintenance window, make sure you configure a total duration of at least two hours and that you assign a device based group to the maintenance window policy.

Trigger the maintenance window

You are now ready to bulk resize using the maintenance window. Triggering a maintenance window can be done from the devices blade within Intune.

After selecting the “bulk device actions” option you can specify what you want to do, and to which devices. Select Cloud PCs as the device type and select the old SKU which you want to change and the new SKU that you want to apply.

Make sure to select that you want to use the maintenance window.

You don’t want to do this for all your Cloud PCs, so you have the option to do this on a group based level or for individual devices. If you want to resize all CloudPCs created by a certain provisioning policy, make sure you use a dynamic group that contains all CloudPCs created by that provisioning policy.

Resize flowchart

After you confirm, the configured Maintenance Window will be triggered on the time you specified and will execute the resize of the Cloud PC(s). As a last step you can remove the user from the group that initiated the creation of the original Cloud PC. This is to prevent overlap in group assignments which all grant access to a Cloud PC.

Microsoft has made this process more easy by providing a flowchart to highlight all possible outcomes of resizing when working with multiple groups, provisioning policies and SKU’s.

Good to know

• If the old license is not removed prior to assigning the new license, the new license is used to resize the existing Cloud PC, and create a new Cloud PC from the old license.
• If you make a mistake and unassign a new license from a user who allready has a Cloud PC, it takes 48h for the Cloud PC to return to a provisioned state.
• If you resize without using a Maintenance Window, the user their session will be interrupted.
• The resizing can take up to 20 minutes and the user will not be able to connect during the resize process.
• As mentioned earlier, downsizing to a higher SKU with less disk space is not supported.