Earlier this year, I attended the MVP Summit in Redmond, Washington and relied entirely on my Windows 365 Cloud PC as my daily driver. My Cloud PC was located over 7,000 kilometers (over 4300 miles for the Imperial guys) away with an ocean between me and the virtual desktop. Whether I was taking notes, joining Teams meetings, or staying productive on the go, Windows 365 delivered a seamless and responsive experience.
Let me highlight this. My Cloud PC was located so far away from me that it was an 8 hour time difference with my current location. Even with that distance, I could collaborate with colleagues back in Belgium, take detailed notes, and handle Teams calls without any issue. I was very impressed by this and didn’t experience any significant input delay whatsoever. When checking the connection information, it obviously stated that the round trip time was high and I might experience issues.
My Cloud PC is located in Dublin, it’s located there because I chose Europe as the geography and set the region to automatic, this means that the service will choose a location that works best for me. Unless there is a good reason to choose a fixed region, I always recommend going with automatic and combining it with the Microsoft Hosted Network (MHN).
Working during a layover at Heathrow airport
Next up is Heathrow, much closer to Ireland than the United States will ever be. A fun moment during this trip was working during a long layover. I had a connecting flight from Seattle to Heathrow, then onward to Amsterdam. Nothing special, except for the fact that the layover lasted over four hours, which gave me plenty of time to get some work done.
I’m not a fan of public Wi-Fi, so I tried using the mobile hotspot on my phone. I initially made the mistake of starting work on my physical device since the file I needed was already stored locally and didn’t require internet access. The offline experience felt nice at first, but as soon as I wanted to collaborate with a colleague, things went downhill very fast. Upload speeds were painfully slow, making real-time collaboration via OneDrive impossible. I suspect the mobile tower or transmission tower near the airport was heavily crowded that day.
Windows 365 Cloud PC to the rescue. While it does require an internet connection, the bandwidth needed to interact with a Cloud PC is significantly lower than uploading large files to OneDrive. Once connected, I was instantly routed through Microsoft’s Azure backbone, and everything just worked. I didn’t test Teams calling but it was a great experience overall.
This is actually one of my favorite parts of Windows 365, its ability to securely connect to a Cloud PC from a slow or untrusted network, and be connected directly to a high performance machine running on a very fast backend.
How Microsoft makes this possible
Creating a Virtual Desktop is nothing new, the technology is over 20 years old, The real challenge today is making it fast and reliable in a world where people work from anywhere, really anywhere. That’s why Microsoft is heavily investing in different technologies that individually all form a piece of a big puzzle that’s aiming to make the user experience even better in the future.
Teams Calling and Audio and Video Redirection
A long time issue on Virtual Desktops was feature parity within Teams. Teams for VDI, which you used on Cloud PC, Azure Virtual Desktop or any other Virtual Desktop platform for the matter, was a spinoff on the regular Teams and relied on WebRTC to offload calls to your local client. Offloading the calls is a good thing, you want to have the call as close as possible to your device so you won’t experience any lag when talking or sharing video. I described the whole concept in my previous blog as well if you’re interested.
The problem with WebRTC is that it’s not owned by Microsoft, which limits their ability to develop and roll out new features as quickly as they do with the regular Teams client. They solved that with SlimCore which is a new framework that contains a self-built WebRTC engine to offload calls and video. By owning the full stack Microsoft has more control over the Teams for VDI experience and they can aim for full feature parity with the regular Teams client.
Oh and if for any reason you work on a client that’s not compatible, it can fall back to WebRTC as well.
RDP Shortpath and RDP Multipath
When you connect to your Cloud PC or Azure Virtual Desktop session host, the connection is established over the internet leveraging modern security. By default, it begins as a TCP session. However, for performance scenarios, especially for audio or graphical workloads, UDP is the better protocol due to its lower latency and faster transmission. This is why Microsoft introduced the UDP based RDP Shortpath which works over both private networks as well as the public internet. Any existing TCP session will be automatically upgraded when a UDP based connection is possible as well.
Did I mention that Shortpath tries to eliminate as many hops as possible by establishing a direct connection with the Cloud PC or Session Host?
As an add-on to Shortpath Microsoft also enhanced the general user experience with a new feature called RDP Multipath, this establishes multiple UDP sessions, if one would fail the other one will take over immediately. Again a big improvement in terms of user experience. This is such a nice feature and the good news is that it’s enabled by default.
The Azure Backbone
Having so much space in between yourself and a remote virtual desktop, isn’t a good idea. However, the closer it is, the better the user experience will be, Microsoft even has calculators for that.
A good thing here is that Microsoft is constantly working to enhance the availability of Azure services close to you. The availability of Azure regions and zones has vastly increased, improving proximity and performance for users worldwide.
Using a Microsoft managed service has a lot of advantages, you don’t have to take care of the hosting aspect, the entire fronted for AVD and Windows 365 is hosted for you and consists of various Azure services. It’s also setup like that that even if you connect from far away you use the services most close to your physical location to initiate the connection.
This means, even if your Cloud PC is 7,000 km away, the connection is first established through nearby Azure services using Azure Front Door, then routed over Microsoft’s high-speed backbone to the datacenter where your Cloud PC resides. This minimizes latency and ensures a smooth user experience across long distances.
Below you’ll find an overview of the current availability of Azure Virtual Desktop gateways, also used by Windows 365. More in depth details on the Architecture can be found here.
Like Local
All these enhancements from Microsoft are part of the broader “Like Local” initiative. This aims to deliver a smooth user experience that feels just like working on a local device, hence the name. Whether you’re connected to Azure Virtual Desktop or a Windows 365 Cloud PC, the goal is to make the whole experience as seamless and responsive as possible.
This initiative focuses on several core components to reduce latency, improve graphics performance, and optimize end-user interaction:
- Integration with the Local OS: Think about Windows 365 Switch or viewing bluetooth devices in your Windows 365 settings pane.
- Minimize Latency: RDP Shortpath that establishes a low latency direct connection
- Enhanced responsiveness: RDP Multipath that automatically establishes multiple connections to the Cloud PC just in case one gets disconnected.
- Improved graphics and device redirection: Better performance when accessing redirected folder from your physical device, better and smooth rendering of the remote session.
Like Local is a really cool project where the team delivers Like Local features and improvements in a very high pace, if you are interested I highly recommend to watch Christiaan Brinkhoff’s video blog where the product team explains the project in much more detail.
To Wrap Up
When I have customer calls around AVD or Windows 365, this is often a question that I get, what about people traveling abroad, how will the experience be? I can now say with confidence that the experience will be just fine. It all depends on the region of course and the availability of Azure services.
Do you have any similar experiences? Feel free to let me know in the comments, If you had recent negative experiences, share them as well so Microsoft knows where there is room for improvement.
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