Next month AZ-140 receives a minor update, just some minor clarifications on some of the topics, rather than the addition or removal of anything. In other words, great news for those of you already part way through your preparation, concerned that you might have to go back to the drawing board.

First off, there was no change in the weightings.

  • Plan and implement an Azure Virtual Desktop infrastructure (40–45%)
  • Plan and implement identity and security (15–20%)
  • Plan and implement user environments and apps (20–25%)
  • Monitor and maintain an Azure Virtual Desktop infrastructure (10–15%)

When I talk to people who are considering this exam, or who have already started their preparation, it’s quite common to find that they fall into three different categories. First of all, there are those who are already working closely with Azure Virtual Desktop, and have broad exposure to the technologies that the exam covers. The second group are those with traditional/on-premises VDI solutions, who tend to have good skills with technologies such as Active Directory, Group Policy etc. The third group are those who work closely with a variety of different Azure technologies, and their job now requires them to start deploying AVD solutions for their organisation. You may not neatly fit into one of these categories, but the chances are you might hover between two of them. Let’s break each of these groups down to discuss where they should focus their preparation efforts.

Those of you familiar with AVD, with some deployment experience under your belt, should be looking at deployment scenarios and technologies that aren’t used in your environments, or maybe they are used, but they aren’t technologies that you are responsible for. A short list, not comprehensive in any way, could be the following

  • providing full desktop experiences, without any RemoteApp experience
  • not having exposure to certain storage solutions
  • deploying the compute components, but the networking components are deployed and managed by another team
  • consuming, but not configuring Azure monitoring solutions
  • Intune only without Group Policy exposure

For the second group, those with traditional, on-premises VDI exposure, the biggest challenge here is going to be the broader understanding of a wide variety of different Azure services, as well as other Microsoft cloud offerings like Entra ID and Intune. I’m not going to downplay how overwhelming this might be if you are thrown into the deep end and expected to be an expert in a short timeframe. I do think it’s worth the effort though, because these Azure skills can be applied to a very wide variety of solutions you will most likely end up deploying over a long period of time.

And finally, the third group, the Azure fluent, but no or very limited exposure to Active Directory, Group Policy etc. The biggest challenge I tend to see here is that if you weren’t planning to spend time learning about what were traditionally on-premises technologies. Maybe Azure AD (Entra ID) was the only AD you thought you would ever have to deal with, and you aren’t all that motivated to dig into things you thought may not be part of your skills acquisition plan. The best advice I can give here is to make sure you are staying on-topic when it comes to your preparation is to not go much deeper than what the exam topics require.

Plan and implement an Azure Virtual Desktop infrastructure (40–45%)

Plan, implement, and manage networking for Azure Virtual Desktop

Plan and implement storage for Azure Virtual Desktop user data

Plan host pools and session hosts

Implement host pools and session hosts

Create and manage session host images

Plan and implement identity and security (15–20%)

Plan and implement identity integration

Plan and implement security

Plan and implement user environments and apps (20–25%)

Plan and implement FSLogix

Plan and implement user experience and client settings

Install and configure apps on a session host

Monitor and maintain an Azure Virtual Desktop infrastructure (10–15%)

Monitor and manage Azure Virtual Desktop services

Plan and implement updates, backups, and disaster recovery