Data locations for Azure Virtual Desktop

Azure Virtual Desktop is available in many Azure regions, which are grouped by geography. When Azure Virtual Desktop resources are deployed, you have to specify the Azure region they'll be created in. The location of the resource determines where its information will be stored and the geography where related information will be stored. Azure Virtual Desktop itself is a non-regional service where there's no dependency on a specific Azure region. Learn more about Data residency in Azure and Azure geographies.

Azure Virtual Desktop stores various information for service objects, such as host pool names, application group names, workspace names, and user principal names. Data is categorized into different types, such as customer input, customer data, diagnostic data, and service-generated data. For more information about data category definitions, see How Microsoft categorizes data for online services.

Customer input

To set up Azure Virtual Desktop, you must create host pools and other service objects. During configuration, you must enter information such as the host pool name, application group name, and so on. This information is considered "customer input." Customer input is stored in the geography associated with the Azure region the resource is created in. The stored data includes all data that you input into the host pool deployment process and any data you add after deployment while making configuration changes to Azure Virtual Desktop objects. Basically, stored data is the same data you can access using the Azure Virtual Desktop portal, PowerShell, or Azure command-line interface (CLI). For example, you can review the available PowerShell commands to get an idea of what customer input data the Azure Virtual Desktop service stores.

Azure Resource Manager paths to service objects are considered organizational information, so data residency doesn't apply to them. Data about Azure Resource Manager paths is stored outside of the chosen geography.

Customer data

The Azure Virtual Desktop service doesn't directly store any User data, i.e. user-created data such as Word documents etc. or application related data such as databases or configuation files, but it does store customer data, such as application names, virtual machine names and user principal names etc., because they're part of the resource deployment process, as described in the Customer input section above. This information is stored in the geography associated with the region you created the resource in. Please see the Data locations section below.

Diagnostic data

Diagnostic data is generated by the Azure Virtual Desktop service and is gathered whenever administrators or users interact with the service. This data is only used for troubleshooting, support, and checking the health of the service in aggregate form. For example, when a session host VM is registered to a host pool, information is generated that includes the virtual machine (VM) name, which host pool the VM belongs to, and so on. This information is stored in the geography associated with the Azure region the host pool is created in. Also, when a user connects to the service and launches a session, diagnostic information is generated that includes the user principal name, client location, client IP address, which host pool the user is connecting to, and so on. This information is sent to two different locations:

• The location closest to the user where the service infrastructure (client traces, user traces, and diagnostic data) is present.
• The location where the host pool is located.

Service-generated data

To keep Azure Virtual Desktop reliable and scalable, traffic patterns and usage are aggregated to check the health and performance of the infrastructure control plane. For example, to help us understand how to ramp up regional infrastructure capacity as service usage increases, we process service usage log data. We then review the logs for peak times and decide where to increase capacity.

Data storage

Stored information is encrypted at rest, and geo-redundant mirrors are maintained within the geography. Data generated by the Azure Virtual Desktop service is replicated within the Azure geography for disaster recovery purposes.

User-created or app-related information, such as app settings and user data, resides in the Azure region you choose and isn't managed by the Azure Virtual Desktop service.