Recently, we saw a huge splash made in the DaaS industry. Login VSI purchased Hydra, which you can read about here. That situation brings up a very interesting debate. Nearly 50% of the industry is using Nerdio to manage their Azure Virtual Desktop fleet. Does Hydra stand a chance to take a bit out of that market share? I thought this would be a good opportunity to look at the community tool written by fellow Microsoft MVP, Marcel Meurer. This will be a very objective look at both tools and see where they fit.
Today, we will do the following:
Why is DaaS Orchestration So Important?
The overall question that is the jumping off point for this entire article is “Why is DaaS Orchestration Important?”
Our entire DaaS industry right now is mired by some of the worst ethics around renewals and just overall behaviors from the major VDI platforms (e.g. Omnissa/Citrix, and others).
We continue to see significant movement from customers rapidly moving to Azure Virtual Desktop. A few of my friends, who are two of the greatest minds in VDI released their latest #DaaSLikeaPro state of EUC late last year showing almost 50% of the industry is now on AVD (with or without products like Nerdio or Hydra). You can read about that here.
With the rampant migration, we’re also seeing many people rethinking how they do VDI/DaaS. Cost reduction is a crucial aspect of that political debate with many people reducing talent on that side of the house, and leveraging tools to make up for their new “skill gaps” from the politics post-COVID and otherwise.
Enter companies like Nerdio and tools like Marcel’s Hydra, which sell a very compelling story. Cost reductions by up to 60-70% on their Azure consumption with VDI. I’ve seen many AVD personal hosts (that’s not counting the multi-session pools) reducing costs from $80 down to $20 per month because of tools like these.
Our need and dependance on something to solve the consumption issue and reclaiming lost money like it’s the movie National Treasure is vitally important. Login VSI obviously noticed this as well, since they have hired Marcel and have implemented his community tool, Hydra in their offerings. The convergence of EUC is constantly evolving and this isn’t any different.
What is Nerdio?
Last year, I wrote about deploying AVD with Nerdio. It’s a very well-known product, which is widely considered the industry leader in DaaS orchestration. Let’s take a quick look at what Nerdio offers today. We will focus today on Nerdio Manager for Enterprise, but they also have a MSP version offering Multi-Tenancy and other capabilities. Some of the features that Nerdio offers are:
- Deployment and Management of:
- Workspaces
- Images
- Host Pools
- Session Hosts
- Managing User Sessions
- Insights into your AVD Deployments
- Runbooks, Scripts, and Automations across your AVD deployment
- App Deployments
- Storage Deployment, Management, and FSLogix automation
- AVD Deployment modeling and recommendations
- Auto-scaling to automatically reduce costs by only having AVD sessions available when you need them.
- New capabilities for Windows 365, Intune, and more that are out of scope of this article.
We’re going to briefly cover some of these capabilities to showcase the power of Nerdio specific to some of Hydra’s main use cases.
Image Management with Nerdio
With Nerdio, we handle images in several different ways. My favorite way is by using the “Initial AVD Setup Deployment” runbook to deploy your AVD instance, which will include building that initial image. I covered that in my blog article here.
Otherwise, you can either build images from an existing Azure VM or directly from the Azure Library. We will cover how those work in more detail when we discuss Hydra vs. Nerdio. You get a very wide range of images you can choose from when building your image including CIS-hardened images.
Nerdio starts to elevate imaging far beyond that with capabilities for staging desktop images before deployment for validation (this is specific to their MSP product but it’s really cool and good to mention).
Managing File Shares with Nerdio
Nerdio today supports both Azure Files and Azure NetApp Files for customers that have different needs and requirements.
You can create shares, manage existing shares, and setup auto-scaling to enhance your storage management with logic.
You can see below that after creating or pulling in existing shares, you can create amazing policies to control the provisioned size, deliver scheduled quota increases, and apply logic to ensure your storage grows with you as an organization.
Host Pool Management with Nerdio
You can easily create or manage existing host pools with Nerdio. You can even pull in additional resource groups so you can manage things that predated Nerdio itself. You can see the awesome UI around it:
They make a ton of capabilities available for managing these host pools like:
- Converting Static Pools to Dynamic Pools
- Cloning Pools
- Easy assignments to Host Pools
- Analytics around savings and costs on a specific Host Pool
- Deploying Apps
- Copying settings from one Host Pool to another.
You also get some amazing property management:
- Moving a pool from AD to Entra ID
- Setting RDP Settings
- Signing all Scripted Actions
- Letting Users reset their own FSLogix profiles
- Disaster Recovery
- VM Backups
- Session Limits
- Azure Monitor Insights and more!
Overall, you get pretty much everything you could want to enhance your Session Pool experience.
Nerdio Session Host Management
Session Host management in Nerdio is really sleek. You can see how much information they fit in a very small space:
In addition, you get a bunch of capabilities that let you manage Session Hosts easily:
- Remote Management via Console Connect (I will be covering Console Connect in depth in a future article)
- Restart, Power On/Off
- Resizing/Re-imaging/Deletion
- Deploy Apps or Scripts
- Sending Messages
- Requesting Logs
- Removing from Auto-scaling
- Deactivate/Activate
- Lock
- Bulk Actions
Nerdio Auto-scaling
The Nerdio Auto-scaling is their bread and butter. You will see that you can easily create policies with precision. You can customize every last item you would image:
They will even show you the estimated monthly costs of your policy so you can plan accordingly, along with insights into the impact of the policy:
One of the most amazing aspects if you can have multiple schedules within the policy, to give more flexibility:
Additional things you can leverage are configuring host pool properties and sizing, along with scaling logic like with storage to put the power in your hands:
The last capabilities are:
- Rolling Drain Mode (which makes sure not everyone is drained at the same time)
- Pre-staging Hosts to eliminate delays by building hosts early
- Messages to users so they know actions are going to hit shortly
- Auto-healing of any broken hosts. The beauty of this one is you can tell it what recovery actions to take:
Something I wanted to note was a recent case study that was published that you can read here. Penn State replaced hand-written PowerShell with NME’s dynamic auto-scaling, leading to an incredible 71% reduction in their AVD compute costs. It’s just a nice example of how powerful the technology can be when used properly.
Nerdio User Session Management
Nerdio user session management is straight-forward. You can basically select a user and log them off, disconnect them, send them messages, etc. It doesn’t need to be complicated it just needs to be succinct and they hit that bar:
What is Hydra?
So, the main question that brings us here today. Hydra is an interesting tool, which is largely a community-based product. As a fellow MVP, we love community tools and know they are the lifeblood of being a Microsoft consultant. Per the Hydra docs, some of the features of Hydra is:
- Multi-Tenancy
- Image Management
- Monitoring and Managing of Azure File Shares
- Session Host Management
- Host Pool Management
- Auto-scaling
- User Session Management
Let’s try to dig a little bit deeper into some of these for clarity.
Hydra Multi-Tenancy
Hydra supports multi-tenancy in two models basically:
- Managed Service Identities
- Service Principals (aka app registrations)
They’re pretty simple to handle. You create the permission model of your choice and give it the contributor role on the subscription or the resource groups. MSIs only work where Hydra is installed (geared toward smaller environments. A fun fact is they also support “split-tenant” mode where you can separate AVD resources and the VMs themselves into different tenants.
Hydra Image Management
Hydra’s image management supports pointing it at a VM you built and turning that into an image to use in your AVD deployments. It’s fairly basic from that perspective as you can see these are the settings below you can configure. They do also support the ability to run scripts on the master prior to the capture like optimizing the OS:
They also support “Imaging Definitions” which are basically the settings you configure in the other tab. This would be used if you make changes to your golden master and want to recapture it quickly, which is nice. It’s also interesting that you can configure a schedule where it will update the image (e.g. if you wanted it to recapture the image once a week). Overall, I think it works well if you know what you’re doing with images, but I can see people struggling early on as it doesn’t provide a ton of guidance for your regular user.
Managing Azure File Shares with Hydra
The Azure File Shares capabilities in Hydra are straight-forward. Firstly, you will see a list of all Azure File Shares along with the usage and quota:
From there, you can configure policies to receive alerts or automatically modify provisioned storage (once daily).
Hydra Session Host Management
You get a decent view at the Host Pool itself below. You will see the name of the pool, its load balancer mode, capacity, session info, and session host information overall:
Upon drilling into it, you will see capacity, sessions, and information about the session hosts themselves:
You will be able to do a few different things to your session hosts:
- Start/Stop/Restart Hosts
- Drain Mode On/Off
- Log Off Users
- Send Messages
- Add New Hosts
- Delete Session Hosts
- Hibernate
- Run Scripts
- Change VM/Disk Size
- Replace Session Hosts
It’s nice to note when creating new session hosts they have a ton of capabilities you can use:
Hydra Host Pool Management
From a host pool management perspective, you can set a few different things.
- Base Config (Set time zone, auto-change the disk type, actions to take on deletion, setting a service account when executing tasks locally)
- Auto Health (will cleanup orphaned sessions on unhealthy hosts after X minutes)
- Deploy Config for new session hosts (naming settings along with network/subnet settings)
- Auto-scaling (more on this later)
- Session timeout (schedules to set timeouts to auto logoff disconnected sessions)
- Script schedules (will run scripts on a schedule on the session hosts as needed)
- Session Host OS Config (enables FSLogix settings, RDS settings, Teams optimization, lets user trigger the install of printer drivers)
- Deployment tag support for when new resources are deployed.
Hydra Auto-scaling
Auto-scaling is obviously important enough for it to have its own section. Basically, you can set different settings like:
- How many session hosts run 24/7
- Minimum number of available sessions, automatic dynamic session host rollouts as needed
- Enabling power-on connect
- Default LB type
- Minimum number of hosts without sessions
- Concurrent starts/rollout of session hosts simultaneously
When you configure the schedule, as you can see above, you can do some advanced things as well:
- Set the schedule recurrence (weekly. monthly, etc.)
- Set the start date/end date of a schedule
- Set Hydra to log users off when a schedule ends (instead of waiting on disconnects)
Overall, Hydra does hit on most of the stuff that we want to see from Auto-scaling.
Hydra User Session Management
The user session management is fairly straight forward. You can log users off, disconnect them, send them messages, or delete their FSLogix profiles.
Closing Thoughts
Well, we are at the close of the first half of this series! Hopefully, this helps set the stage for those new to this story. Optimization of Azure Virtual Desktop and cutting costs are the goal here among other lofty pursuits.
The question we ask ourselves is: “how does Marcel’s great community tool matchup against the market leader?”, who arguably owns as much of a market category as any other product besides probably Intune. Does each have a place? Does it matter at this point?
Check out next week’s finale to find out the answers and how they measure up!
