Any thoughts/experiences with AVD Hybrid?

I've not worked with it so don't have any info on it. It could be a good way to start I guess if you have time left on your hardware

Right..was wondering if sort of a way to dip toes in

Like the Citrix Cloud control plane, it should provide access to onprem hardware, which many customers still have and/or need to depreciate still. One key item is around power management. Out of the box, AVD Hybrid does not do that; hence Nerdio/Nutanix/Hydra stepping up on that front. Also only in preview now but eventually a hybrid license will be required so interesting to see what that is But no more compute/storage/egress charges when OnPrem? https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-desktop/hybrid-overview#session-host-deployment--power-management

Thanks Corey.. right, thats understood. Probably right regarding the license as well. I am curious what you "gain" by implementing AVD Hybrid too

I'm also curious

I think it is the same as installing Arc for on prem. If you want to manage it from the azure control plane you can tie it to rbac and azure policy/defender etc. I've yet to work anywhere that thought this was worth the effort or needed. I am 98% of my time an Azure guy and also agree with this. Managing via VMWare, etc. for on prem seems fine to me. But was a vmware/hyperv admin for a long time so maybe it is comfort zone. More likely it is a thinly veiled sales tool to get you in azure ecosystem and then love it so much just migrate natively there. Which happening anyway in most places, so again don't see need for arc or hybrid avd. But then our horizon license was ending and hardware was close to EoL so went to retirement. So native AVD was setup to replace not augment.

Are you using Nerdio or something similar Jeff?

No. Straight AVD, but deployed and managed with terraform from ADO.

Ive heard of terraform but dont know much about it. I was under the impression you need SOMETHING to manage AVD though or its a bear to scale up/down, etc

Auto scaling new hosts with vmss setup is in preview. They way it is now you deploy all the shared hosts you need and can have auto scale sleep/wake those on schedules and have some different behavior if you do depth first vs breadth first load balance. It can hibernate or deallocate persistent vdi on scaling schedule as well. This can be managed via GUI. We put it in the Terraform, coukd use bicep. Probably also push changes using powershell, maybe azcli. It isnt all that difficult to manage.

one fear i have is that come 8:30am a bunch of people get on a server, then towards the end of the day all these hosts are still running with 1 user left.. lol .. cant think of a way to avoid that without popping up a message "this server is going to be shutdown, save your work and log back in" :\