Change Session Host VM size in Azure Virtual Desktop [English]

Azure Virtual Desktop is a cloud-based virtual desktop experience that allows you to connect to Azure Virtual Machines and virtualized applications. This desktops are organized in pools named Host Pools. Each pool has a set of virtual machines that serve as the desktops or sessions and wen you add a new VM, the default size is taken from the Host Pool info. How about to change the default size of the VM? In this article, we will use the PowerShell power to change that.

First, install the Azure PowerShell module using the Install-Module command (the recommended option to install using the PowerShell 7.0 LTS version or higher):

Install-Module -Name Az

The next step is to connect to the Azure using the Connect-AzAccount command:

Connect-AzAccount

Before start to work with PowerShell, you need to select the Azure subscription you want to work with, using the Select-AzSubscription command:

Select-AzSubscription -SubscriptionName "<subscription name>"

And then, we can start to define a few variables to get the necessary information before change the host pool VM size. The first one is the host pool name and then, the resource group name, required to indentify the host pool. With those values we can use the Get-AzWvdHostPool to save the host pool object in a variable. Using the Get-AzWvdSessionHost command, we can get the session host objects (the VMs) and choose one to find the info related to the image definition.

$hostpoolName = "General"
$resourceGroup = "AVD-RG"
$hostpool = Get-AzWvdHostPool | Where-Object { $_.Name -eq $hostpoolName }
$sessionHosts = Get-AzWvdSessionHost -ResourceGroupName $resourceGroup -HostPoolName $hostpool.name
$existingHostName = $sessionHosts[-1].Id.Split("/")[-1]
$adDomain = $sessionHosts[-1].Id.Split("/")[-1].split(".", 2)[1]
$currentVmInfo = Get-AzVM -Name $existingHostName.Split(".")[0]

With a one VM selected, we can access to the image reference id:

$imageReference = ($currentVmInfo.storageprofile.ImageReference).id

And save into a variable the VM prefix from a hostname:

$prefix = $existingHostName.Split("-")[0] + '-' + $existingHostName.Split("-")[1]

Now we can extract the template used to create the hosts in the host pool from:

ConvertFrom-Json (Get-AzWvdHostPool -HostPoolName $hostPoolName -ResourceGroupName $resourceGroup).vmtemplate

With all the info we can start to define the new VM template and after that, we can use the Update-AzWvdHostPool command to change the default VM size for the Session Hosts into the pool. We need to change the vmSize value to the new size we want:

$newtemplatesize = @{
    domain                = $adDomain
    imageType             = 'CustomImage'
    customImageId         = $imageReference
    namePrefix            = $prefix
    osDiskType            = 'StandardSSD_LRS'
    vmSize                = @{id='Standard_D4s_v3'; cores=4; ram=16}
}
Update-AzWvdHostPool -Name $hostPoolName `
  -VMTemplate $($newtemplatesize | ConvertTo-Json) `
  -ResourceGroupName $resourceGroup

The full script is here:

Happy scripting!