Azure Virtual Desktop Host Pool High Availability with Nerdio

👉 This isn’t traditional disaster recovery — it’s continuous availability by design

Designing Resilient AVD with Nerdio's Host Pool Multi Region Setup

🧠 Introduction

When people talk about Disaster Recovery (DR) in Azure Virtual Desktop, they often think of:

• Secondary regions
• Failover plans
• Downtime scenarios

But in reality:

👉 AVD DR should be designed as High Availability (HA) from day one

With Nerdio Manager for Enterprise, you can design host pools that are:

• Resilient
• Scalable
• Ready for failure scenarios

Nerdio Calls this “Host Pool Multi Region”

🔄 What is Host Pool High Multi Region?

Nerdio enables a single host pool design, where:

• Automatically distributes newly created VMs between a primary and secondary Azure region

⚙️ How Host Pool High Availability Works (Nerdio Multi Region)

Nerdio’s host pool Multi Region capability enables a true active-active high availability model across two Azure regions.

Rather than relying on a traditional failover approach, Nerdio automatically distributes session hosts and user connections across both regions, ensuring continuous availability.

🔄 Active-Active Host Distribution

When Host Pool Multi Region is enabled:

Newly deployed session hosts are automatically distributed between:

• Primary region
• Secondary region

User connections are:

• Evenly balanced across both regions
• Not dependent on a single active site

👉 This means both regions are actively serving users at all times.

⚡ Automatic Resilience During Outages

If one region becomes unavailable:

• Users are automatically redirected to the remaining region
• No manual failover is required
• Service continuity is maintained

👉 This is what elevates the design from “disaster recovery” to true high availability

🌐 Networking & Identity Requirements

For this design to function correctly, both regions must have:

• Network connectivity (line of sight) to Active Directory\Entra Domain Controllers
• Or future support for Microsoft Entra ID (cloud-native identity)

⚠️ In current production scenarios:

• Active Directory connectivity is still required across both regions

💾 FSLogix Profile Resilience with Cloud Cache

User profile availability is handled using FSLogix Cloud Cache, which is a critical component of this design.

Profiles are replicated across:

• Primary storage location (Region A)
• Secondary storage location (Region B)

Each session host is configured with:

• Both Storage Endpoints
• Region-Local storage set as primary

🧠 How Cloud Cache Works in This Design

Hosts in Region A:

• Use Region A storage as primary
• Region B storage as secondary

Hosts in Region B

• Use Region B storage as primary
• Region A storage as secondary

👉 This ensures:

• Local performance
• Cross-region resilience
• No single point of failure for user profiles

🧱 Host Pool-Level Configuration

All DR logic is applied at the host pool level, where Nerdio handles:

• VM distribution across regions
• FSLogix configuration
• Profile replication (via Cloud Cache)
• Connection balancing

⚠️ Prerequisites

Before enabling Host Pool Multi Region, ensure:

• Network connectivity to domain controllers from both regions
• Azure Files (or equivalent) storage deployed in both regions
• FSLogix configured with Cloud Cache enabled

🔧 Important Configuration Requirement

To enable Host Pool Multi Region:

• FSLogix must use Cloud Cache

If not already configured:

• Create a new FSLogix profile configuration
• Or update an existing one
• Enable Cloud Cache
• Assign it to the host pool

🧠 FABS Insight

👉 Host Pool Multi Region is your safety net, not your scaling solution

It protects against:

• Regional outages
• Platform-level failures

But it does NOT solve:

• Capacity shortages
• Scaling issues

🏁 Final Thoughts

Host Pool Multi Region with Nerdio gives you:

• Structured resilience
• Predictable failover
• Enterprise-grade DR capability

But to achieve true availability, you need more…

👉 Which leads to the next capability.

👉 Reference:
https://nmehelp.getnerdio.com/hc/en-us/articles/26124319021837-Host-Pool-Disaster-Recovery