Azure Virtual Desktop Made Easy: Your Path to Domain Join Victory

Deploying Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) can be an exciting step towards enhancing your organization's productivity and flexibility. However, many beginners encounter challenges during the deployment process, especially when session hosts fail to be domain joined. In this blog, we'll explore common issues faced by newcomers and provide practical solutions to ensure a smooth and successful AVD deployment. Whether you're an Azure expert or just starting out with AVD, this blog is worth your time.

Understanding the Root Causes

Before we delve into the solutions, let's explore the primary reasons behind the session host failing to be domain joined. These reasons include:

a) VM unable to reach the domain controller

b) Insufficient permissions for the provided Active Directory user to join the VM to the domain

Essential Pre-Deployment Steps

To ensure a smooth deployment process, there are crucial pre-deployment steps that I highly recommend you take:

a) Manual VM domain join: Manually join a VM to the domain to iron out any potential issues before deploying AVD.

b) Update DNS server in VNET: Change the DNS server of your Virtual Network (VNET) to the private IP address of your domain controller to enable seamless domain communication.

c) Proper user account privileges: Ensure that the user account used to domain join the VMs is a member of the domain admins group.

d) Firewall Considerations: Be cautious of any firewalls in your environment, and configure necessary application rules to allow session hosts to reach Azure Virtual Desktop services on the internet.?On my case was receiving the below error:

"Error downloading?https://wvdportalstorageblob.blob.core.windows.net/galleryartifacts/Configuration_1.0.02384.163.zip?after 17 attempts: Unable to connect to the remote server."

I resolved the above error by allowing the following URLs and ports needed for an AVD deployment:

After addressing the potential pitfalls and following the tips mentioned above, you should be ready to deploy your Azure Virtual Desktop environment successfully.

Once your environment is set up, you can proceed to deploy desktop sessions and remote app application groups, providing your users with a seamless virtualized experience.

Thanking you sincerely for going through this blog. Now go forth and deploy your AVD environment with ease.