Dieter Kempeneers

Microsoft has introduced the ability to move individual Cloud PCs to a new region. This feature serves as an additional tool in your toolkit, enabling phased migrations and offering flexibility when managing large-scale Cloud PC deployments. You no longer need to move all your Cloud PCs at once.

It only applies to a region change within the policy

Although the feature is called “Cloud PC Move,” it still relies on the existing components of Windows 365, including regions and provisioning policies. As with the standard setup, a region remains linked to a provisioning policy. This new capability enables a controlled, phased migration when you change the region associated with a provisioning policy.

It’s not a move between policies

In my opinion, it would have been more powerful if Cloud PCs could be migrated between provisioning policies linked to different regions. This would enable the migration of a single Cloud PC without affecting all future deployments tied to the original provisioning policy.

This cloud/would increase flexibility a lot and would provide options if a user is traveling to a remote location. For example, if a user travels frequently between Europe and the US, you could ensure their Cloud PC is closer to their current location, improving performance and reducing latency.

Let me show you how to use it

It’s a minor addition, but I believe it’s a really cool feature that enhances the flexibility of managing your Windows 365 Cloud PCs. Let me quickly demonstrate how to use this nifty little feature.

As usual it starts within the Intune portal. Go to the Windows 365 blade and edit an existing provisioning policy,

Ensure you select the policy responsible for provisioning the Cloud PC. Instead of relocating the Cloud PC itself, we will modify the linked policy and change it to a different region.

So let’s edit the policy.

This new move feature will pop up after you change the geography of a Cloud PC. Just change it to a value different than it was originally. In my example I changed it from EU to Germany.

That’s all that is to it. When I now click apply. I will have the option to apply this change to a select amount of Cloud PCs.

This will open a new window where you select the Cloud PCs that you want apply the policy change to. It will also show the current Geographical region so it’s easy to keep track of the current location of all the Cloud PCs from this provisioning policy.

Keep in mind that you need to check the checkbox at the bottom where you acknowledge that users with an active session will be interrupted and that the Cloud PCs will be shut down during this process.

Pressing select will trigger the change, this change can take up to 24hours.

You can always view the current status in the action report. In this case it shows pending, but after the move, it will show Succeeded as in the examples below.

If I were to apply the region change again, the cloud PC that has already been moved would be excluded from the list.

Let’s wrap up!

The new Cloud PC Move feature provides a useful tool for administrators to manage Windows 365 Cloud PCs more flexibly. Although it’s not possible to move Cloud PCs between policies, it is again a nice extra feature that adds flexibility for the Windows 365 admin.

Let me know your thoughts on this feature in the comments!