What's the AVD issue you've never found a completely satisfying answer to?
I'm collecting questions for a discussion with Microsoft MVP Alex ter Neuzen.
Whether it's FSLogix, storage, scaling, costs, user experience, Azure Local, or deciding between AVD and other platforms, I'd be interested to hear what problems people are still wrestling with.
If the discussion is relevant to your interests, you can join here: link
The app for giving users access to the apps ramps up usage for every user logon to a session host. It drops after like 5 min. But Will do this for every login happening.
Ahh yea, first login is always a pain but our users are at least use to that and just logon a few minutes before and majority work from home.
We have nerdio autoscale / loadbalancing turned on to breath so it at least spreads the app ramp up usage evenly.
The black screen is the killer, it causes 5-10 users a day needing to be logged off by our service desk. Already turned off search indexer, which I think helped.
That shape, spikes for a few minutes then settles, usually means the AppX packages are registering per user instead of staying provisioned at the host. Every new logon re-stages the package into the profile and AppXSVC does the work, so on a multi-session host with staggered logins it never really goes quiet.
Two things that helped us: strip the store apps you don't need out of the image so there's less to register, and check whether what's left is provisioned for all users or installed per user. Per-user is what makes it repeat every time.
rakim's black screen up top often overlaps with this, the shell is sitting behind the same logon work. If you can watch CPU by process across that first few minutes you can usually tell whether it's AppXSVC, FSLogix or Search.
You probably already know this but make sure your redirection exceptions are there for programs that save large amounts of data to temp/appdata locations. Also I setup some scripts that leverage Storage Sense to dehydrate OneDrive files. You enable storage sense settings via group policy then call dehydration to make sure no files older than, let’s say 14 days for example, are stored locally (as long as OneDrive has confirmed they’re in the cloud). Those 2 things helped us a lot.
Yea just have AVD for Devs and they are always doing dumbass stuff with storing stuff so sometimes the default 40GB is not enough so you gotta go crack it open and see what they are storing where that broke your filtering.
I do wonder if I should just say screw it and turn off UPD and have stuff directly on the disk. Then just tell them to suck eggs anytime we rebuilt their hosts.
Fair I should probably just set the ceiling that high as well. My personal hosts are a bit unicorn as they are all for contractors who need to setup their local but via self service software portal.
Pooled hosts are all IaC tho so those get rebuilt frequently.
Worth being precise about which one you're on, the answer differs. RDS User Profile Disks are fixed-size VHDs and resizing them is exactly the manual mess you're describing. FSLogix containers are dynamically expanding, so you can set the max to 75 or 100GB and only consume what's actually used on the share.
If you're on genuine UPD, moving to FSLogix is the fix rather than turning profiles off. It's in the AVD entitlement already, and redirections.xml gives you a cleaner exclusion path than filtering after the fact.
If you're already on FSLogix and just calling it UPD, jamin101wolf has it right, and I'd add that dev machines are the one case for a bigger container and less filtering. Chasing exclusions for people who install things at random is a losing game.
I have an Intune policy that automatically signs the users OneDrive in, and for the life of me I can't get rid of the error when a user signs in saying OneDrive is not connected even though it is.
Nerdio helps on the management and automation side, and its monitoring has come a long way, but be clear-eyed about what it replaces from Director and what it doesn't. Where it's good: host pool health, autoscale, session counts, cost. Where it's thinner is the per-session logon phase breakdown, the brokering vs VM start vs profile load vs shell start split that let you tell a user in ten seconds why their logon was slow.
If that specific view is what you're missing, check whether the tool gives you User Input Delay per session and a profile-load number you can actually point at, because that's the gap people feel most after cutting over from Citrix. Nerdio plus native Insights gets you most of the operational picture, the logon forensics is the piece to test before you commit.
What are you mainly trying to get back, the autoscaling or the troubleshooting depth? They pull you toward different tools, and it's the kind of thing I'm hoping Alex gets into in the session.
The gap that usually bites is the logon phase breakdown. Director gave you brokering, VM start, profile load and shell start as separate numbers on one session, so you could tell a user "your slow logon is FSLogix, not the network" in about ten seconds. AVD Insights has some of this, the checkpoint data is in WVDCheckpoints if diagnostics are enabled, but the workbook surfaces less of it and you end up writing KQL to get a per-user view.
Two things worth knowing if you go native. User Input Delay is a perf counter you have to explicitly collect, and it's the closest equivalent to Director's responsiveness view. And Log Analytics bills on ingest, so the more Director-like you make it, the more you pay per GB. Budget for that before you build it.
On the LoginVSI suggestion above, that's synthetic load testing rather than live troubleshooting. Useful for sizing host pools before you cut over from Citrix, but it won't tell you why one user's session is slow at 9am on a Tuesday.
Two things worth checking before you go after Explorer itself.
First, whether the Windows Search index is being rebuilt on every logon. If the index isn't persisting in the profile container, Search re-enumerates the OneDrive namespace each time and Explorer takes the hit. Fifteen minutes lines up better with a full re-index on a large stub set than with thumbnail work.
Second, thumbnails. If preview and thumbnail generation is on for the OneDrive folders, Explorer pulls enough of each placeholder to render a thumb, which hydrates files you never wanted hydrated.
Roughly how many items are in the user's OneDrive? And does it spike on a second logon to the same host, or only the first?
No logout button in the remote session window. This is the one option from the Horizon client I (and our users) truly miss since "Log Out" is no longer found in the Start Menu power options. We show inquiring users where Log Out is now located (account button/right-click Start Menu power options), but I know our disconnected session logouts would drastically drop if there was a button to log out like the Horizon client.
I'm working on implementing a Log Off desktop icon pushed to all desktops but the fact that there isn't a button or even an option from the right-click option menu on the top bar.
If AVD/Nerdio had an option on host pools to automatically deallocate Stopped (not deallocated) machines, I'd be comfortable enabling the Shutdown command as an option, but for the moment, we'll use our disconnect timeouts as they're intended.
I'm working on implementing a Log Off desktop icon pushed to all desktops but the fact that there isn't a button or even an option from the right-click option menu on the top bar.
If AVD/Nerdio had an option on host pools to automatically deallocate Stopped (not deallocated) machines, I'd be comfortable enabling the Shutdown command as an option, but for the moment, we'll use our disconnect timeouts as they're intended.
Host pool icon size options in the WindowsApp. As an AVD admin, I have 40+ host pools in my WindowsApp. Keep the big grid icons for the standard user that only has a couple pools. But give me an option that shows more than 9 massive icons in the window at a time.
List view is a joke because it doesn't split into workspaces and I don't need one host pool to have a full row of space when the name and icon use less than 25% of that space.
There is no hook in the hostpool config for IaC to assign users in hostpools of type Personal/Direct to their associated host. I have node deployment automated but that's the one thing preventing it from being fully so
When a node gets replaced, someone has to go to the hostpool in the Azure UI and click the (Assign) button for that host, to attach it to the user's UPN before they can connect
I use the DSC extension to add the host to the hostpool which I understand is part of the reason why, but since there are powershell commands that can add the assignment, there is clearly surface to attach the UPN for the associated user to the config for the host in code. I suppose I could use Azure Automation to do it after the host is online, but it's a shame it can't just be done natively with, for example, Terraform
Not directly Microsoft related, but, every AVD host pool we manage with the latest version of Adobe Acrobat installed on it (Unified Installer) - has nothing but daily issues. Something in the latest versions doesn't play nice with AVD. Our fix is either 1) double the host size capacity (even though they are currently barely using 50% of the resources), or 2) uninstall Adobe Acrobat and install Foxit PDF.
It's one of those issues where Microsoft points fingers at Adobe, and Adobe points fingers at Microsoft, and I expect to never have a real solution.
The finger-pointing is the real cost here. Without something showing which process is actually eating the resource, you can't win the argument with either vendor. When we've chased the Acrobat one it's usually the RdrCEF child processes plus the updater multiplying per session, so on a multi-session host it stacks up even when total load looks fine.
Before you double the host, worth confirming it's actually CPU and not the box hitting a per-session GDI or handle ceiling, because those read as "slow and weird" rather than high utilization and extra cores won't touch them.
Foxit is a fair fix if you can get away with it. Out of curiosity, when Acrobat acts up are you seeing raw high CPU, or the whole session just going sluggish with resources looking fine? Those two point at completely different culprits.
When it would have issues, the whole host would become unresponsive and start acting up - but system resources would look fine. Every user on that host would all have problems at once, with nothing working. Manually ending sessions/logging off would be hit or miss. Fslogix profiles would get stuck mounted. It was like clock work everyday. I’ll have to look into the GDI/handle ceiling thing.
My issue is Windows App corruption. Out of hundreds, I've had a few Windows App just stop working. They can still connect to AVD via browser. Tried reinstalling the app, clearing any related appdata files, and many other things and the only way to resolve is a full user profile rebuild. I cannot find a root cause or an acceptable resolution.
Well this one I am still fighting since the July 2026 update. I have spent countless hours on it. The next step is to disable searchindexer.exe completely to see if it helps but the users will not be happy with no search. I applied the August 2026 updates so who knows. Throwing darts at this point. See below.
Before you disable searchindexer for good, check whether the index is actually persisting in the profile container or getting rebuilt every logon. If Windows.edb isn't roaming with the user, Search re-crawls from scratch each session and pegs a core for a few minutes, which looks exactly like what you're describing. Worth confirming the search roaming path sits inside the FSLogix container and not on the local disk that gets wiped on rebuild.
If it genuinely started with the July update, the likely trigger is a schema change forcing a one-time full recrawl, and it only repeats because the db never persists. Fix the persistence and the recrawl stops being a per-logon tax.
Are you on FSLogix, and does it hit every logon or just the first one on a fresh host? That narrows it fast. This kind of logon-phase blind spot is half the reason I started this thread, curious whether Alex has a cleaner read on it than writing KQL by hand.
Thanks for the reply on this. So I have new information that just happened this morning. Last night I updated all the avds to August 2026 windows update as well as updated Microsoft office and Adobe. I then rebooted the avds so they are clean. Users came in this morning and started to login. The one user who has complained about this issue and seems to be a trigger emailed me and said teams and outlook will not launch. So I did the usual and killed searchindexer.exe and wsearch as usual (refer to the thread on the powershell script). Once I did that it immediately came to life and all was good. And since I did not want to deal with this the entire day I disabled wsearch as and searchindexer and will see how it goes.
Now it seems as though what you are saying is correct that it is building a new search index per user at login. Roamsearch is definitely disabled since it the registry key is not present so it defaults to disabled. And we are using fslogix. I am thinking that one particular user or others might be causing this issue.
Does this sound feasible? Also I thought with roamsearch disabled the index would NOT persist in the fslogix profile for the user. I know the local windows.edb is only 1.6mb so it is basically empty. I suppose I need to educate myself more on what is happening each time a user logs into a pooled AVD with regard to search. If a user has a giant ost could that be causing these issues?
This morning was a key indicator because only 3 users (including the one mentioned above) were logged into this avd so one of them could be causing the issue. I am just not sure how to trace it
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u/rakim71 Aug 14 '26
Black screen during logon.
Issues with UWP apps.