Blog, Page 7
In-depth articles on Azure Virtual Desktop cost optimization, architecture, governance, and operational best practices from the Atlas AVD team.
Latest articles
- Entra ID Retires the memberOf Dynamic Group Rule on November 3, 2026: What Freezes and How to Migrate
Microsoft is ending the memberOf preview for Entra ID dynamic membership rules. After November 3, 2026, dynamic groups, dynamic administrative units and access package auto-assignment policies that use it stop updating and stay frozen in their last state. Here is what that breaks, the PowerShell to find every affected object, and four ways to replace the rule.
- Azure Virtual Desktop Black Screen: Causes and Fixes
Why Azure Virtual Desktop users get a black screen after connecting, how to narrow it down in a minute by pattern, and the fix for each cause: slow sign-in, FSLogix profile failures, the shell not starting, a bad image or update, the client device, and hung sessions.
- Exclaimer Alternatives in 2026: Seven Email Signature Tools Compared
Exclaimer is the best-known signature-marketing platform, but it isn't the only way to run Microsoft 365 signatures. If you need on-premises Exchange, want mail kept out of a vendor's cloud, or just want signatures without a campaign engine, one of these seven alternatives may fit better. Each is summarized from the vendor's own pages, with who it suits and what to check.
- Azure Region Pairs: The Full List, and What Pairing Does (and Doesn't) Do
Microsoft links some Azure regions in pairs for geo-redundant storage, staggered updates and recovery priority. The full list of pairs, Microsoft's one-way pairs, the nonpaired regions, which services depend on pairing, and why a pair isn't a disaster recovery plan on its own.
- App Delivery on AVD: App Attach vs WinGet vs Baking Apps Into the Image
Every app on an Azure Virtual Desktop host gets there one of three ways: baked into the golden image, installed at deploy time with WinGet, or mounted at sign-in with App Attach. This guide compares the three on image size, update speed, isolation and licensing, explains what changed from MSIX app attach to App Attach, lists the apps that don't package well, and gives a decision matrix by app type.
- What Is Azure Virtual Desktop? A Plain-English Guide
A plain-English guide to Azure Virtual Desktop: what Microsoft runs and what runs in your subscription, how workspaces, application groups, host pools and session hosts fit together, which licenses include AVD, what you still have to build, and who it's a good fit for.
- Azure Latency by Region: Microsoft's Statistics and What AVD Users Need
Microsoft publishes median latency between Azure regions, but not from your users to Azure. What the statistics show, Microsoft's AVD latency thresholds, how to measure real users' round-trip time with WVDConnectionNetworkData and AVD Insights, and how RDP Shortpath helps.
- Citrix to Azure Virtual Desktop Migration: A Step-by-Step Plan
Leaving Citrix after a renewal quote? This guide walks through the whole move to Azure Virtual Desktop: choosing full AVD or a Citrix-on-Azure transition, inventorying delivery groups, catalogs, apps, policies and profiles, mapping every Citrix concept to AVD, a pilot-then-waves cutover, user experience parity, and a before-and-after cost model. Atlas AVD consulting can help at any step.
- Keep FSLogix Profiles Small: Container Size and Compaction on AVD
FSLogix containers can grow but never shrink on their own. How SizeInMBs and dynamic disks work, exactly when sign-out compaction runs and why it often doesn't, the event IDs that prove it ran, what really fills profiles, and how to shrink a container that's already too big.