Cloud VDI seems to be the new Dev desktop shiny, so I guess it's a good time for the new Virtual Desktop Architectural Reference Guides.

Welcome to the US SMB&D TS2 Team Blog - Virtual Desktop Architectural Reference Guides (Including Azure) Just Released

Josh Condie – With VDI becoming more and more an opportunity for partners who host client services for small and mid-sized customers, Microsoft just released the guidance necessary to help you design effective desktop services using our latest Hyper-V, VDI and RDS technology in Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8.  Key to success here is brining the costs of infrastructure down and ease of deployment and management up.  Microsoft made great strides in the Server OS in both departments.  For example, the support of Direct and SMB Share storage designs and inclusion of advanced storage management capabilities such as Storage Tiering, Deduplication and Thin Provisioning, bring costs down greatly for mid-sized deployments numbers.  ...

The Traditional Desktop Hosting Reference Architecture Guide can be found here.

Using Azure:

For hosting partners looking for a rapid expansion of their capacity, we now offer Windows Azure as another avenue to achieve VDI scale.  Per the article:

“The primary goal is to enable hosting providers to create secure, scalable, and reliable desktop hosting solution offers for small- and medium-sized organizations with up to 1,500 users. The intended audience for this reference architecture is hosting providers who want to leverage Windows Azure infrastructure services to deliver desktop hosting services and Subscriber Access Licenses (SALs) to multiple tenants via the Microsoft Service Provider Licensing Agreement (SPLA) program.”

A logical view of the Azure architecture looks this:

The logical architecture diagram shows a two-layer architecture with the following layer definitions:

· Desktop Hosting Service: Virtual machines, networks, and storage that make up the functional service for each tenant.

· Infrastructure Services: Consists of the Azure management portal, load balancer, VPN gateway, Windows Server operating system instances running the Hyper-V role used to virtualize the physical servers, storage units, networks switches, routers, and so on that make up the Azure Infrastructure Service. The Azure infrastructure Services allow the VMs, networks, storage, and applications to be created independently from underlying hardware.

For the full technical article and guide, navigate here.

...

Windows Azure Desktop Hosting - Reference Architecture and Deployment Guides

Windows Azure Desktop Hosting Reference Architecture Guide

Summary: This document defines a set of architectural blocks for using Windows Azure Virtual Machines to create multitenant, hosted Windows desktop and application services, referred to in this document as “desktop hosting.” The primary goal is to enable hosting providers to create secure, scalable, and reliable desktop hosting solution offers for small- and medium-sized organizations with up to 1,500 users. The intended audience for this reference architecture is hosting providers who want to leverage Windows Azure infrastructure services to deliver desktop hosting services and Subscriber Access Licenses (SALs) to multiple tenants via the Microsoft Service Provider Licensing Agreement (SPLA) program. To deliver a desktop hosting solution via Microsoft’s SPLA program, hosting partners leverage Windows Server and the Windows Desktop Experience feature to deliver Windows users an application experience that is familiar to business users and consumers. Although Windows 8, Windows 7, and earlier Windows client versions are not licensed for SPLA, the Desktop Experience feature in Windows Server 2012 provides a similar user experience and application support.

Author: Microsoft Corporation

Published: September 2013

Revision: 1.0

Download: To review the document, download it now.

Windows Azure: Desktop Hosting Deployment Guide

Summary: This document provides procedural guidance for deploying a basic desktop hosting solution based on the Windows Azure Desktop Hosting Reference Architecture Guide. This document provides you with a starting point for implementing a Desktop Hosting service on Windows Azure virtual machines. You’ll have to perform additional deployment steps in a production environment to provide advanced features such as high availability, customized desktop experience, RemoteApp collections, etc.

Author: Microsoft Corporation

Published: October 2013

Revision: 1.0

Download: To review the document, download it now.

Seems everyone, well bleeding edge early adopters anyway, are hosting their dev vm's in the cloud and using smaller end devices, like Surfaces, ultrabooks, etc to access them.

This the future of the dev desktop? It could be, if we can get over the security concerns... (or have them hosted on an in-house cloud, but there could be issues with that as well...). Anyway, I saw these guides and thought I should snag them for future reference.