If your organization runs VDI on VMware or Citrix, the last 18 months have been budgeting chaos. Broadcom's licensing changes, Citrix's restructuring, and aging on-prem hardware have pushed every IT leader we work with toward the same question: how do we modernize without writing off the existing investment? Microsoft's answer is Azure Virtual Desktop Hybrid, in public preview as of May 4.
What AVD Hybrid is
AVD Hybrid extends the cloud-managed Azure Virtual Desktop service to on-premises environments. Your session hosts run on your own hardware, on your preferred hypervisor, in your own datacenter. The AVD control plane, brokering, identity, monitoring, and policy stay in Azure. Your users access desktops the same way they would with cloud AVD, through the standard Windows App client.
How it works
The connection between your on-prem session hosts and the Azure-hosted AVD control plane runs through Azure Arc. So we aren’t talking about a new technology that is untested, it works. Once a host pool is registered through Arc, Azure treats those session hosts the same way it treats cloud-resident VMs for brokering connections, applying policy, and reporting telemetry. Session host management, including provisioning and image lifecycle, continues to use your existing partner integrations. The end user opens the Windows App, signs in with Entra ID, and gets brokered to a desktop. Whether that desktop runs in Azure or in your datacenter is a deployment decision the user never sees. AVD Hybrid is available to any customer with an active Azure subscription. Public preview documentation is at aka.ms/AVDHybridDocs.
Why it matters
Modernize at your pace, on your hardware. AVD Hybrid does not require you to replace your datacenter, your hypervisor, or your storage. The capital you have already deployed in on-prem VDI infrastructure stays useful, and the operational model improves immediately because the management plane is consolidated in Azure. For organizations that have spent the last year modeling a forklift exit from VMware or Citrix, this changes the budget conversation to allow for minimal footprints for edge cases and cloud scalability for optimization.
A real incremental migration path. Start with session hosts on-prem. Move workloads to Azure as workload owners are ready, as renewals come up, or as your data residency posture allows. The control plane is identical for both, so users see no change. Your operations team avoids running two parallel VDI stacks during the transition.
Existing investments are preserved. The partner ecosystem for image management, application layering, and provisioning continues to work. Intune and Nerdio Enterprise Manager functions across both if you are leveraging either for image management.
One pane for everything. Your AVD admin console shows every session host in one place, regardless of physical location. Conditional access, Microsoft Defender coverage, Intune policy, and Azure Monitor visibility all extend uniformly. The operational simplification is the part most teams feel first.
Where AVD Hybrid fits, and where it doesn't
Best fit: existing VDI footprints in regulated industries or need for local survivability (manufacturing, financial services, healthcare, government), organizations with data residency requirements that block a full public cloud move, environments with latency-sensitive workloads that need session hosts close to the user or the data, and any organization currently planning a multi-year exit from a legacy VDI vendor. Not to minimize the other use cases but manufacturing and healthcare really stand out here. Both scenarios where you can’t have operations tied to the loss of internet connectivity.
Worst fit: greenfield deployments with no on-prem footprint to preserve, businesses that would be better suited for simple Intune MDM/MAM thick-clients, organizations that have already standardized on cloud-only AVD and have no datacenter strategy, and small environments where cloud AVD's economics already make the case for full migration.
How eGroup helps
I’ve supported VDI clients on Horizon, Citrix, and AVD for decades. We help clients evaluate whether AVD Hybrid fits their operational model, design the Arc-connected architecture for their data residency and identity requirements, and execute deployments that protect existing partner investments while building toward a cloud-resident future. The work usually starts with a current-state assessment of your existing VDI footprint, your renewal calendar, and the specific workloads driving cost or risk. If you are evaluating an exit from VMware, Citrix, or Horizon and want to model what AVD Hybrid means for your environment, a discovery conversation with our practice is the right next step.