Recommend an appropriate storage solution

Completed

Azure offers multiple storage solutions that you can use to store your FSLogix profile container. This unit compares storage solutions that Azure offers for Azure Virtual Desktop FSLogix user profile containers.

We recommend storing FSLogix profile containers on Azure Files for most of our customers.

Azure Virtual Desktop offers FSLogix profile containers as the recommended user profile solution. FSLogix is designed to roam profiles in remote computing environments, such as Azure Virtual Desktop.

When a user signs in the container is dynamically attached to the environment using a natively supported Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) and a Hyper-V Virtual Hard Disk (VHDX). The user profile is immediately available and appears exactly like a native user profile. Graphic of  available services appears exactly like a native user profile.

The following tables compare the storage solutions Azure Storage offers for Azure Virtual Desktop FSLogix profile container user profiles.

Azure platform details

Features

Azure Files

Azure NetApp Files

Storage Spaces Direct

Use case.

General purpose

Ultra performance or migration from NetApp on-premises

Cross-platform

Platform service.

Yes, Azure-native solution

Yes, Azure-native solution

No, self-managed

Regional availability.

All regions

All regions

Redundancy

Locally redundant/zone-redundant/geo-redundant/geo-zone-redundant

Locally redundant

Locally redundant/zone-redundant/geo-redundant

Tiers and performance

Standard (Transaction optimized) Premium Up to max 100 K IOPS per share with 10 Gbps per share at about 3-ms latency

Standard Premium Ultra Up to 4.5Gbps per volume at about 1-ms latency.

Standard HDD: up to 500 IOPS per-disk limits Standard SSD: up to 4k IOPS per-disk limits Premium SSD: up to 20k IOPS per-disk limits We recommend Premium disks for Storage Spaces Direct.

Capacity

100 TiB per share, Up to 5 PiB per general purpose account

100 TiB per volume, up to 12.5 PiB per subscription

Maximum 32 TiB per disk

Required infrastructure

Minimum share size 1 GiB

Minimum capacity pool 4 TiB, min volume size 100 GiB

Two VMs on Azure IaaS (+ Cloud Witness) or at least three VMs without and costs for disks

Protocols

SMB 3.0/2.1, NFSv4.1 (preview), REST

NFSv3, NFSv4.1 (preview), SMB 3.x/2.x

NFSv3, NFSv4.1, SMB 3.1

Azure management details

Features

Azure Files

Azure NetApp Files

Storage Spaces Direct

Access

Cloud, on-premises and hybrid (Azure file sync)

Cloud, on-premises (via ExpressRoute)

Cloud, on-premises

Backup

Azure backup snapshot integration

Azure NetApp Files snapshots

Azure backup snapshot integration

Security and compliance

All Azure supported certificates.

ISO completed

All Azure supported certificates.

Microsoft Entra integration

Native Active Directory or Microsoft Entra Domain Services support only.