Multiple Personal Desktops with Azure Virtual Desktop – A Likely Underrated New AVD Feature

Last week, I was delighted to discover a LinkedIn post by Christiaan Brinkhoff pointing to the blog post “In public preview: Multiple personal desktops with Azure Virtual Desktop.”

In our company, we’ve really missed this feature. We typically follow a “one device strategy,” where each user has exactly one device – either a physical laptop or a virtual desktop (VDI). We’ve been using VDIs for a long time, especially for external partners, test environments, and internal users with special requirements. Until now, we have implemented this On-Premises with VMware as the hypervisor and Citrix as the broker. Providing multiple VDIs per user has never been a technical problem.

Currently, however, we are in the midst of a cloud transformation, and Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) is the cloud-based VDI solution of our choice. But here, we encountered a limitation: the ability to assign multiple virtual desktops to a single user. This made the announcement of the new feature even more exciting for me, even though it is still in public preview. I do, however, expect that it won’t be long before this feature is generally available.

Why is this a game-changer?

I’m convinced that many companies face similar challenges to ours. For instance, software testing often requires more than one virtual machine (VM). Similarly, robotics VDIs frequently need to access multiple desktops on the same user. Moreover, there are cases of incidents where it is better not to repair the virtual machine but rather to replace it with a new instance based on the “pets vs. cattle” principle. In these scenarios, it can be very useful to temporarily have access to two virtual desktops to extract data or transfer certain configurations from the old VM to the new one.

Previously, the only way to achieve this was through two host pools. The downside was that the user would see two resources, even if they were only permitted to access one of the two VMs. With the new feature, this is no longer an issue. Even when using multiple host pools, the feature ensures that no “ghost resources” are displayed when no resource is available for a user in a host pool.

What’s new and how do you enable it?

As you can see in the image, activating this feature is very simple – you just need to set a flag to enable the functionality:

After that, a new field named “Friendly Name” appears in the AVD client to help users differentiate between the virtual machines:

Limitations of the feature

Currently, this feature only applies to AVD Single-Session machines. It does not work with Multi-Session deployments or Windows 365. It’s unclear whether or when this feature will be made available for Multi-Session environments, but in my opinion the need is more fore SingleSession VDIs.

Conclusion

This new AVD feature is a real step forward for companies that need multiple desktops per user, whether for testing, troubleshooting, or special requirements. I am excited to see how this feature evolves and when it becomes generally available. It will certainly help many companies make their VDI environments more flexible and user-friendly.

What’s your opinion? Is this feature another step toward feature parity with existing virtual desktop solutions? What would be your next desired feature? Let me know in the comments.