By David,
If you work in Azure, you have typed eastus a thousand times. It is in every ARM template, every az command and every resource group you have ever created. But if someone asked you where Azure's East US physically is, would you say New York? Boston? Somewhere near the Atlantic?
It is in Virginia. And it is not the only Azure region whose name sends you to the wrong part of the map. Central US is in Iowa. South Central US is in Texas. West Central US is in Wyoming. West US is California, but West US 2 is Washington State, a whole coastline to the north.
Region names describe a direction, not a place. For most Azure work that is fine. For a virtual desktop it matters, because every keystroke and every mouse movement makes a round trip between the user and the region their session host runs in. A user in Seattle on a desktop in Virginia feels the whole continent in every click.
This article lists every Azure region and the city, state or country it lives in, and explains how the User Portal finds each user's best desktop for them, so your users never need to know any of this.
The short version: Microsoft names US regions by direction, and the directions are loose: East US and East US 2 are both in Virginia, Central US is in Iowa, North Central US is in Illinois, South Central US is in Texas and West Central US is in Wyoming. Outside the US, most region names include the country. The User Portal measures each user's connection to every region their desktops run in, from their own device, and recommends the best desktop at the top of the page with a Connect Now button.
Locations below come from Microsoft's published region list as of October 2026, with links in the Sources section at the end.
United States regions
Microsoft publishes the state for each US region, not the city, and it does not publish datacenter addresses. The metro area in the third column is the one each region is commonly associated with, so treat it as a guide to where your packets travel, not a street address.
| Region | Name in code | State | Metro area |
|---|---|---|---|
| East US | eastus | Virginia | Virginia (Microsoft does not name a city) |
| East US 2 | eastus2 | Virginia | Boydton, southern Virginia |
| Central US | centralus | Iowa | Des Moines |
| North Central US | northcentralus | Illinois | Chicago |
| South Central US | southcentralus | Texas | San Antonio |
| West Central US | westcentralus | Wyoming | Cheyenne |
| West US | westus | California | San Francisco Bay Area |
| West US 2 | westus2 | Washington | Quincy, central Washington |
| West US 3 | westus3 | Arizona | Phoenix |
A few things in that table surprise people:
- East US and East US 2 are both in Virginia, and they are not a pair. East US pairs with West US, and East US 2 pairs with Central US. If you are planning disaster recovery, two "East" regions do not give you two halves of the country.
- "Central" means the middle of the country, loosely. Central US is in Iowa, North Central US is in Illinois, and West Central US is in Wyoming. West Central US has no availability zones, so it is rarely the right home for production session hosts.
- The West regions span the whole coast. West US is in California, West US 2 is in Washington and West US 3 is in Arizona. A user in Los Angeles is much closer to West US or West US 3 than to West US 2.
US Government regions
Azure Government is a separate cloud, physically isolated from the public regions, for US government agencies and their partners, including organizations on Microsoft 365 GCC High.
| Region | Name in code | State |
|---|---|---|
| US Gov Virginia | usgovvirginia | Virginia |
| US Gov Texas | usgovtexas | Texas |
| US Gov Arizona | usgovarizona | Arizona |
US Gov Virginia is the only one of the three with availability zones. The US DoD East and US DoD Central regions are reserved for Department of Defense workloads.
Canada and Latin America
| Region | Name in code | Location |
|---|---|---|
| Canada Central | canadacentral | Toronto, Canada |
| Canada East | canadaeast | Quebec City, Canada |
| Mexico Central | mexicocentral | Querétaro State, Mexico |
| Brazil South | brazilsouth | São Paulo State, Brazil |
| Brazil Southeast | brazilsoutheast | Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (restricted) |
| Chile Central | chilecentral | Santiago, Chile |
Restricted regions are held back for specific scenarios, usually disaster recovery for the region they pair with. You request access before you can deploy there.
Europe
| Region | Name in code | Location |
|---|---|---|
| North Europe | northeurope | Ireland (Dublin) |
| West Europe | westeurope | Netherlands (Amsterdam area) |
| UK South | uksouth | London, United Kingdom |
| UK West | ukwest | Cardiff, United Kingdom |
| France Central | francecentral | Paris, France |
| France South | francesouth | Marseille, France (restricted) |
| Germany West Central | germanywestcentral | Frankfurt, Germany |
| Germany North | germanynorth | Berlin, Germany (restricted) |
| Switzerland North | switzerlandnorth | Zurich, Switzerland |
| Switzerland West | switzerlandwest | Geneva, Switzerland (restricted) |
| Norway East | norwayeast | Norway (Oslo area) |
| Norway West | norwaywest | Norway (Stavanger area, restricted) |
| Sweden Central | swedencentral | Gävle, Sweden |
| Denmark East | denmarkeast | Copenhagen, Denmark |
| Poland Central | polandcentral | Warsaw, Poland |
| Austria East | austriaeast | Vienna, Austria |
| Belgium Central | belgiumcentral | Brussels, Belgium |
| Italy North | italynorth | Milan, Italy |
| Spain Central | spaincentral | Madrid, Spain |
The two oldest European names catch people out the same way the US ones do: North Europe is Ireland and West Europe is the Netherlands.
Middle East and Africa
| Region | Name in code | Location |
|---|---|---|
| UAE North | uaenorth | Dubai, United Arab Emirates |
| UAE Central | uaecentral | Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (restricted) |
| Qatar Central | qatarcentral | Doha, Qatar |
| Israel Central | israelcentral | Israel |
| South Africa North | southafricanorth | Johannesburg, South Africa |
| South Africa West | southafricawest | Cape Town, South Africa (restricted) |
Asia Pacific
| Region | Name in code | Location |
|---|---|---|
| East Asia | eastasia | Hong Kong |
| Southeast Asia | southeastasia | Singapore |
| Japan East | japaneast | Tokyo and Saitama, Japan |
| Japan West | japanwest | Osaka, Japan |
| Korea Central | koreacentral | Seoul, South Korea |
| Korea South | koreasouth | Busan, South Korea |
| Central India | centralindia | Pune, India |
| South India | southindia | Chennai, India |
| West India | westindia | Mumbai, India |
| India South Central | indiasouthcentral | Hyderabad, India |
| Indonesia Central | indonesiacentral | Jakarta, Indonesia |
| Malaysia West | malaysiawest | Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia |
| Taiwan North | taiwannorth | Taipei, Taiwan (preview) |
| Australia East | australiaeast | New South Wales (Sydney), Australia |
| Australia Southeast | australiasoutheast | Victoria (Melbourne), Australia |
| Australia Central | australiacentral | Canberra, Australia |
| Australia Central 2 | australiacentral2 | Canberra, Australia (restricted) |
| New Zealand North | newzealandnorth | Auckland, New Zealand |
Azure in China is a separate cloud operated by 21Vianet, with its own regions in and around Beijing and Shanghai.
Look it up yourself
Your own subscription will tell you which regions it can use, with the coordinates Microsoft publishes for each one:
az account list-locations --query "[?metadata.regionType=='Physical'].{Region:displayName, Name:name, Latitude:metadata.latitude, Longitude:metadata.longitude}" -o table
Why the region matters so much for a virtual desktop
Most cloud workloads tolerate distance. A web page that loads 60 milliseconds later is barely noticeable. A remote desktop is different, because the user is interacting with a computer in that region, and every keystroke, scroll and click makes the round trip. Under about 50 ms a desktop feels local. Past about 150 ms typing starts to lag behind the fingers, and by 250 ms users stop trusting what they see on screen.
Three things follow from that:
- Put session hosts near the people who use them. A team spread across two coasts is usually better served by a host pool on each coast than by one pool in the middle.
- Keep profiles next to the hosts. FSLogix profile containers belong in storage in the same region as the session hosts that mount them. A profile share in another region adds its latency to every sign-in. See FSLogix troubleshooting and why AVD sign-ins are slow.
- Users should not have to know any of this. Once you run desktops in more than one region, asking an accountant in Denver to choose between "Pool – West US 3" and "Pool – Central US" is asking them to read the table above. They will pick the first one in the list.
That third point is where the User Portal comes in.
How the User Portal finds each user's best desktop
When a user signs in to the User Portal, Atlas Smart Connect™ has already done the picking. Instead of a list of desktops to guess between, the top of the page shows the one desktop Smart Connect recommends for that user right now, tells them This is currently your best desktop., and offers one button: Connect Now.
It measures latency from the user's own device
A distance table cannot tell you how fast a particular user's connection is. A user on hotel Wi-Fi in Chicago and a user on fibre in the same building can see very different round-trip times to the same region, and a VPN can route someone's traffic hundreds of miles out of their way.
So the portal measures it. While the page loads, the user's browser sends a few tiny requests to a public Azure endpoint in each region where that user's desktops run, times the round trip, and keeps the fastest result. It reads nothing back, installs nothing and needs no setup. For desktops in US Government regions, the portal measures against the Government cloud's own endpoints, so the check never leaves the Government cloud.
That measured latency is what the user sees on each desktop card, marked Measured from your device. If a measurement cannot be taken, because a firewall blocks it or the network is slow to answer, the portal falls back to a typical figure for that region, marked Estimated for this region, and the page carries on. The recommendation is never held up by more than a couple of seconds.
The closest region is not always the best desktop
Latency carries the most weight, but a nearby pool that is full, busy or unhealthy is the wrong place to send someone. Smart Connect scores every desktop assigned to the user on four things:
| Factor | What it asks |
|---|---|
| Network latency | How fast is this user's connection to the desktop's region? |
| Computers ready for you | How many session hosts are online and accepting new sessions? |
| Current session load | How busy are those hosts right now? |
| Current host health | Are the hosts healthy? |
A pool with no hosts taking sessions drops to the bottom, and hosts that are draining for maintenance do not count as capacity. So when your nearest region is mid-update, users are sent to the next-best one without anyone filing a ticket.
It explains its choice
The recommendation is never a black box. Every pick comes with a Why this desktop? panel showing:
- An Atlas Confidence score, higher when the winner leads the other desktops clearly and when its latency was measured rather than estimated.
- The reasons it won, in plain language: Lowest latency (18 ms), Most sessions available, Lowest current utilization.
- Badges such as Closest Region, Lowest Latency and Least Busy.
- An estimated login time, so the user knows what to expect.
Every other desktop the user can reach is listed underneath under Other Available Desktops, searchable and sorted, so someone who needs a specific pool can always choose it.
What admins control
Nothing has to be configured. Smart Connect ranks whatever host pools you have published to each user, in whichever regions they run, and it comes with the User Portal on every plan, including the free Community edition. If you would rather users did not see the millisecond figures, turn off Latency score in the portal settings. On Professional and above, Smart Connect Insights shows how often users follow the recommendation.
Where to go from here
- Read how Smart Connect works in the feature tour.
- Set up the User Portal for your users with the step-by-step support guide.
- Size your session hosts for each region before you deploy.
- Start with the free Community plan and open the User Portal on your own host pools.
East US is in Virginia. Your users do not need to know that, and with Smart Connect they never will.
Sources
- Microsoft Learn: List of Azure regions
- Microsoft Learn: Azure Government overview: list of regions
- Microsoft Learn: Azure region pairs
- Microsoft Learn: Azure in China regions
- Microsoft Learn: Azure Virtual Desktop network latency