Today we are happy to announce the general availability of hibernation support in Azure Virtual Desktop. Explore additional capabilities that make it easier to save compute costs for your idle resources.

Hibernation support in Azure Virtual Desktop

In November 2023, we announced the public preview of hibernation support in Azure Virtual Desktop. Hibernating a session host virtual machine (VM) deallocates the machine while persisting the VM’s in-memory state. When a VM hibernates, you don’t pay for the compute cost associated with the VM. Instead you pay only for the storage and networking costs associated with the VM. When the session host virtual machine starts, the user will be able to quickly resume from where they left off.

The following capabilities are now generally available in Azure Virtual Desktop:

Hibernation can be enabled for session host VMs deployed to personal host pools.
Hibernation can be chosen as the scaling action for disconnect or logoff for personal host pools. For more details about configuring personal scaling plan, see Create a scaling plan.

These capabilities are available in addition to those released during the public preview, which included the following:

Hibernation can be enabled on existing session host VMs.
Resize is supported for session host VMs with hibernation enabled.
Hibernation support extended to more VM sizes and series.

Getting started

You can enable hibernation when deploying session host VMs for your personal host pools using Azure Portal, PowerShell, CLI, ARM, SDKs, and APIs. You can enable hibernation for existing VMs using PowerShell, CLI, ARM, SDKs, and APIs.

A screenshot of personal host pool Virtual Machines configuration in Azure Virtual Desktop with vTPM and Integrity monitoring, Virtual machine size is set to ’Standard D2as v5’, hibernate is enabled.

To enable hibernation in your scaling plan, you will need to:

Create a personal scaling plan.
Define whether to enable or disable Start VM on Connect.
Choose to perform hibernation after a user session has been disconnected or logged off for a configurable period of time.
Assign a personal scaling plan to one or more personal host pools.

A screenshot of a scaling plan in Azure Virtual Desktop with a schedule of ramp-up is shown as repeating Monday to Friday at 9:00 AM Beijing time, starting VM on Connect. Disconnect settings are set to hibernate at 30 minutes. Log off settings are set to hibernate after 10 minutes.

Helpful resources

We encourage you to learn more about setting up autoscale and review frequently asked questions for more details on how to use hibernation with autoscale for Azure Virtual Desktop personal host pools. You may also find these resources helpful:

Microsoft Mechanics: Automated scaling, imaging & monitoring
Azure Academy: Enabling and managing Personal Desktop Autoscale
Cost Optimization for General Purpose VMs using Hibernation now Generally Available

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