Parallels RAS: Azure Virtual Desktop User Experience enhancements

This video is part of a Parallels TechBytes series. In this video, we'll take a look at some of the enhancements that Parallels RAS brings on top of Microsoft Azure Virtual Desktop. Parallels RAS allows you to deploy, manage, and maintain Azure Virtual Desktop directly from within the console, providing a smooth administrator experience. Parallels RAS provides the ability to significantly reduce Azure consumption cost, with features like auto-scaling, image optimization, and much more. Furthermore, Parallels RAS supports hybrid deployments. As a result, you can have a mix of workloads running in Azure Virtual Desktop, on-premises, and on multiple clouds. And finally, Parallels RAS improves the user experience by providing additional features on top of what native Azure Virtual Desktop provides. In this video, we'll focus on some of the features related to optimizing the user experience. Let's take a look at how to enable Azure Virtual Desktop management within Parallels RAS. This is the Parallels RAS console, and we've landed on the Site Overview page. From here, you have detailed information on the components that are part of this deployment. The session host servers, the configured providers, secure gateway servers, two Azure Virtual Desktop host pools, and the connection brokers. To enable Azure Virtual Desktop management, go to Settings and click on the Features tab. Click Enable Azure Virtual Desktop Management. Now configure the feature set to Standard, Advanced, or Fallback. Selecting Standard unlocks the ability to use Parallels RAS-specific user experience features out of the box with no additional configuration required, while also allowing Parallels RAS clients to transparently leverage the latest Azure Virtual Desktop client version. In this video, we'll take a look at four examples of user experience features that Parallels RAS brings on top of native Azure Virtual Desktop. The first feature is accelerated file redirection. Allowing users to access their local data from within published desktops and published applications is a very common scenario. The native RDP protocol, however, is not very efficient for file and folder enumeration when using drive redirection. This often leads to slow and sluggish user experience, especially when trying to enumerate a folder with a large number of files. Parallels RAS provides a smooth user experience for drive redirection and fixes the slowness in enumerating files and folders with the drive redirection cache feature. To enable accelerated file redirection, go to policies and open a policy you want to use. Go to disk drives and folders. From here, you can enable allow redirection. Select specific drives to redirect and optionally enable redirection of drives that are plugged in later. Now configure the cache. You can set it to disable, enable, and fast mode. Fast mode provides the best user experience when using the Parallels RAS client for Windows. Now switching to the end user. Let's take a look at a side-by-side comparison. Left-hand side, we have the native Azure Virtual Desktop experience. Right-hand side, we have drive redirection cache enabled. On both sides, we open Windows Explorer as a published application using the Parallels RAS client. When browsing to this PC and opening the local redirected C drive, we already see some difference in the time it takes to enumerate all files and folders. The difference becomes really visible when browsing to a folder that contains a large number of files and subfolders. In this case, we browse to the SysWOW64 folder. Notice that the session on the right-hand side with drive redirection cache enabled completes the enumeration of close to 3,000 items in about two seconds. The left-hand side without drive redirection cache is really struggling. Notice that very slowly files and folders start to appear. You can confirm this by looking at the green progress bar and the total number of items that are enumerated, which is highlighted in the lower left corner. For demo purposes, we are looking at the system folder of the OS disk, but the same experience, of course, also applies to, for example, the local My Documents or local desktop folders that are accessed remotely. The enumeration process on the left-hand side is now ready. In this example, the same enumeration process with drive redirection cache enabled was about 20 times faster. This feature optimizes how communication is carried out compared to the standard RDP and adds caching of the folder structure on the Azure Virtual Desktop session host. This applies to the Parallels client for Windows as well as the Parallels client for macOS and also applies to published desktops, published applications, in single session, and in multi-session. The next feature we'll look at is URL redirection. There are several use cases where you might want to redirect specific URLs outside of the user's remote session to have them handled on a local client. Common use cases, for example, are server-to-client redirection for specific application requirements where local resource usage is preferred over remote. To enable URL redirection, go to Farm, Settings, and open up the URL Redirection tab. Note that we have already added two URLs here. Teams.Microsoft.com is configured to be redirected to the local client and Parallels.com is configured to run within the remote session. To add a new URL, simply click on the plus sign, enter the URL, and select Redirect or Do Not Redirect. Switching to the user experience. We have already logged on to the Parallels REST client for Windows, and as you can see, this user has access to a few sample applications, in this case, running on Azure Virtual Desktop. To demonstrate URL redirection, let's open up WordPad as a remote app. You can tell this is a remote app by looking at the application in the taskbar, which has an overlay icon indicating it's remote. We now open up a prepared document. This document has two hyperlinks, a link to Parallels.com, which, based on our configuration, should not be redirected, and a link to Teams.Microsoft.com, which, based on our configuration, should be redirected to the local client. If we click on the Parallels.com link, a browser within the remote session is opened. This Edge browser is running as a remote app. Again, you can confirm this by looking at the overlay icon in the taskbar. So in this case, we leverage the resources on the session host server remotely. If we click on the Teams.Microsoft.com link, the local browser's being used. Note that there's no overlay icon in the taskbar. So in this case, we leverage the resources on the local client. Let's now close all of these windows and take a look at a more common scenario. Here we have Outlook running as a remote application, and we have just opened an email invite containing a link to a Teams call. Redirection is enabled for Teams.Microsoft.com. And as a result, clicking on the link inside Outlook results in opening the local browser, allowing us to use the resources available on the local client. Feature number three we'll take a look at is launching local applications. Parallels RAS includes features to launch locally installed applications from within the remote session. To configure this, open the RAS console and go to Publishing. Note that we have a folder AVD here with a subfolder called Local Apps. In there, we have a published application. Go to the Application tab. For the target, browse to 2xRemoteX.exe. And for the parameter, provide the application you want to launch from within the local client. For this demo, we configure this to be Notepad, but it can be any application available on the local client. Now switching to the user side. We are already logged on. Let's first open Notepad on the remote session. We can confirm this is a remote application by looking at the overlay icon visible in the taskbar. Now let's launch the same application, but this time locally. Go to Local Apps and launch the published application. For demo purposes, we are showing this question dialog here, but as an admin, you can also choose to suppress this. Notepad is now open locally, as you can tell by the difference in themes. This feature allows you to create a mix between local and remote apps and have the Parallels RAS client act as the central launcher for all applications. This feature applies to both published desktops and published applications for single and multi-user environments. The last feature is Universal Printing. Parallels RAS Universal Printing is designed to enhance the printing experience in virtualized and remote environments. It provides advanced printing capabilities out of the box and offers a great user experience. Features include compression, multi-function support, increased performance, and an optimized user experience. We have a full TechBytes video that is dedicated to Universal Printing. You can find a link in the comments of this video. In this video, we'll focus on two specific features. The first feature we'll take a look at is dynamically updating the default printer upon changing it locally. This is the Parallels RAS console and we've landed on the Policy Overview page. Open a policy that's being used and go to Printing. Note that the current selection is to redirect all local printers. You can change that to a subset or to only the default printer. Select Default Only. Next, click on Change Default Printer Settings. In here, you can change the default printer behavior. Make sure that the option to update remote default printers based on local changes is selected. Click OK and apply the policy change. Now disconnect the desktop session and refresh to make sure that the new Parallels RAS policy is applied. Reconnect to the desktop. This allows you to reconnect to the existing disconnected session. Note that in this case, only the default printer is visible inside the remote session. We take the desktop out of full screen again to see how local printer changes are now being applied. Here is the local printer dialog again. In this case, we make the newly added printer the local default. As you can see on the left-hand side, this is instantly applied in the remote session as well. This allows organizations to apply policies to only redirect local printers while still allowing users to change the local printer and have it available inside the remote session without having to log off and log on again. The second feature is optimizing the time it takes to recreate redirected printers upon session reconnect. Here we are comparing two user sessions. The session on the left-hand side is based on Microsoft Native EasyPrint and the session on the right-hand side uses Parallels RAS Universal Printing. Let's consider a scenario where the user has disconnected the session, for example, to switch physical locations or the user just came back from a lunch break. In both sessions, we are going to reconnect to that already existing session that is in disconnected state. Note that within one second, Parallels RAS on the right was able to make all redirected printers available again in the remote session. The session without Parallels RAS Universal Printing took about 10 seconds, which makes RAS Universal Printing about 10 times faster. A common scenario where this is very useful is when dealing with third-party applications that require a printer to be available prior to launching the application. And this concludes the video on enhancements that Parallels RAS brings on top of Microsoft Azure Virtual Desktop. Recall from the beginning of this video that selecting the standard feature integration now unlocks the ability to use Parallels RAS specific user experience features out of the box with no additional configuration required, while also allowing the Parallels RAS client to transparently leverage the latest AVD client version. For more content, subscribe to our channel and browse to the Parallels TechByte series.