DrainGuard™ removes session hosts you have drained and finished with. Turn it on, pick a cleanup mode, and Atlas deletes each host that is in maintenance mode once it has had no sessions for the idle time you chose. Just before deleting, Atlas re-reads the live session count from Azure: a host with any session, active or disconnected, is left alone, and so is one whose count cannot be read. Runs are capped per pool and per tenant, personal and AVD Hybrid pools are never touched, and it stays off until you enable it.
Key capabilities
- Cleanup modes: Cost Focused (15 minutes idle), Balanced (30) or Availability Focused (60), or your own minimum idle time
- With Require Maintenance Mode on (the default), only hosts drained through Atlas qualify
- Live session count re-read from Azure before every delete; a host with a session, or an unreadable count, is skipped
- Optional cleanup window by hours and days, in your timezone
- "If DrainGuard Ran Right Now..." previews which hosts would be deleted and the projected savings
- Monitoring-only mode: turn off Delete Idle VMs to evaluate and log without deleting anything
- Caps per run (by default 2 hosts per pool and 10 per tenant), with personal and AVD Hybrid pools always skipped
- Drain & Reclaim on a host pool does the same for hosts you select, and every action goes into the DrainGuard activity log
How DrainGuard™ works
- Open DrainGuard, choose a cleanup mode and turn it on; saves that can delete VMs ask you to confirm
- Drain hosts through Atlas when you are done with them
- Every 15 minutes Atlas finds hosts in maintenance mode that have been empty for the idle time
- It re-reads each host's live session count from Azure and deletes only the ones still empty, within the caps
Available on: Atlas AVD plan and above
DrainGuard™ is included in every Atlas AVD subscription.