Even though traditional Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) management tools can provide visibility, they often fall short. They can identify what is happening in your AVD setup, but they don’t really do anything about it. While getting full visibility into your AVD environment is the essential first step, monitoring alone isn’t enough. If there’s a spike in user activity that increases resource usage, for example, it may not be noticed until many hours, or even days, after the fact. By then, your organization has already wasted valuable funds.
But with ControlUp’s AVD cost optimization, there’s a better, more efficient way. You can optimize your AVD spend by combining automated management with real-time performance data.
Shifting from Azure Virtual Desktop Monitoring to Optimization
Microsoft Azure Virtual Desktop management requires more than performance monitoring. That still leaves a lot of work on IT’s shoulders. Rather, you should implement real-time operational optimization.
With ControlUp, you get:
- Automated AVD management actions
- Intelligent, AI-powered decision-making
- Proactive AVD session host monitoring and repair
Not only can you reduce AVD deployment time from weeks to hours, but you can also get automated Microsoft AVD performance tuning and optimization.
How to Improve AVD Performance with ControlUp
Many IT teams use ControlUp ONE as their AVD management platform because it integrates AVD monitoring and optimization into a single solution. In this way, it eliminates the extra work that comes with a reactive management approach.
With ControlUp, you can automate actions in the operational layer of AVD using:
- Script-based automation
- Native actions executed directly on your AVD environment
- Real-time execution to reduce costs
Here are some ways IT teams use ControlUp for optimizing AVD resource allocation.
Aligning VM Sizing with Actual Usage
ControlUp gives you real-time performance metrics that reflect actual user behavior. This paves the way for AVD cost savings from de-provisioning idle desktops and optimizing AVD costs across multiple Azure subscriptions. This is because ControlUp can:
- Adjust VM sizing based on user demand, considerably reducing excess spending
- Prevent over-provisioning by gauging actual user demand
- Make sure resource usage matches real workload requirements
In other words, ControlUp gives you more than just user experience monitoring and analytics tools for AVD. It provides automated AVD cost optimization and reduced energy consumption.
Reducing Waste Through Session Management
Idle or disconnected user sessions can consume CPU and memory, keeping machines running unnecessarily and increasing costs.
How to analyze AVD user workload performance:
You can have ControlUp:
- Log off idle or disconnected users
- Enforce session limits that stop usage after a certain threshold
- Optimize resource usage in each session
As a result, you can boost user density without increasing costs.
Automating Your Infrastructure’s Behavior
IT teams looking into how to reduce AVD costs often miss opportunities at the infrastructure management level. Intelligent autoscaling is a big part of the answer, and modern AVD autoscale goes far beyond what native Azure tooling offers.
Beyond autoscaling, ControlUp also lets you use script actions to take direct control of your infrastructure:
- Execute your PowerShell, batch, or Visual Basic scripts
- Automate time-consuming administrative tasks
- Apply changes across your environment instantly
These scripts can be applied to almost any operational scenario. For example, consider the savings you could experience by using ControlUp to set host pool session limits. Instead of spinning up one VM after another, you can have ControlUp set a limit of 10 users per VM. Depending on usage behavior, this could cut your VM spend drastically.
At the same time, let’s say 10 users are ultimately too many and the CPU gets overloaded. Using ControlUp, you can adjust the limit down to 7 or 8 users, striking a balance between cost savings and user experience.
Eliminating Idle Infrastructure
AVD cost savings through de-provisioning idle desktops are a key way to curb expenses. With ControlUp’s automated features, this is relatively straightforward because it can:
- Shut down machines that don’t have active sessions
- Dynamically align infrastructure with use demand
- Aggressively optimize after-hours use to prevent unnecessary spend
This means you don’t have to leave resources running as a fail-safe, or just-in-case measure. Your environment adjusts continuously by scaling down during demand drops and scaling up when necessary.
How AVD Cost Optimization Reduces Energy Consumption
Whether you’re reducing energy use for a general green initiative or to cut costs for your private cloud setup, ControlUp’s automation makes it far easier.
To illustrate the potential impact, consider this hypothetical example based on typical enterprise VM configurations:
Your initial setup includes 200 VMs running 24/7. Each VM supports five users. As a result, many sessions are disconnected but still active. Using ControlUp, you implement dynamic scaling and VM right-sizing. This brings your average user per VM to 10, doubling capacity and allowing you to shut down half of your instances.
Suppose each VM consumes about 300 watts. Before ControlUp’s optimization, you were using around 200 VMs x 300 watts/VM = 60,000 watts. Post-optimization, you’ve cut your energy use to 100 VMs x 300 watts/VM = 30,000 watts.
Over the course of a full year, that’s about 262,800 kWh saved. Imagine the savings if you were running a private cloud. At $.30 per kWh, you’re shaving off $78,840.*
*Note: Energy costs will vary by region. This example uses $0.30/kWh for illustration purposes only.
Use ControlUp for AVD Cost Optimization
Optimizing Azure cost is an ongoing operational discipline. Automating it with ControlUp takes much of the burden off IT’s shoulders. Instead of continuously manually aligning performance, usage, and costs, you can have ControlUp handle it for you. This optimizes the use of your AVD environment while saving your organization money.
See how it’s done with a quick conversation and demo.
