Introduction

In previous blog posts I took a look at Windows 365 Reserve, explained what it was and shared my thoughts about how to implement it and configuring it for use as a disaster recovery method in your organization.

In this post, I wanted to address some additional items that did not show themselves clearly until after provisioning and using Windows 365 Reserve Cloud PC’s for some days, as this will help you plan accordingly.

You can review the other posts in this mini-series below.

• First looks at Windows 365 Reserve 
• Following up on Windows 365 Reserve
• Final thoughts on Windows 365 Reserve <- you are here

Imagine the scenario, your sales workers are somehow hit with malware or a cyber attack, or some other disaster leaving their physical laptops rendered unusable. Luckily, you had some Windows 365 Reserve licenses purchased in advance and assigned them to those very same workers before the incident occurred. So far, so good.

Once the incident occurred, you informed those sales workers to connect to their Windows 365 Reserve Cloud PC’s via the Windows app from any device that supported it. This allowed them to continue working until the damage from the Cyberattack was resolved and they could utilize their physical laptops again.

Those sales workers logged back on to their physical laptops and completely forgot about their Windows 365 Reserve Cloud PC’s.

What happens to those reserve Cloud PC’s and the 10 day window of opportunity that they are entitled to ? That’s what this blog post will focus on.

3 days remaining

If you as the Intune admin fail to do anything about the Windows 365 Reserve Cloud PC’s after they did their job, then the clock will keep ticking and even if they are not in use, the 10 days left will expire, rendering them unusable.

This becomes apparent in the Intune console, by locating the Windows 365 Reserve provisioning policy, and selecting the devices tab.

Look at the Days left column, in the example below, it states only 3 out of 10.

In addition, the end user will be notified in the Windows app, via the Windows 365 Reserve Cloud PC title itself,

and via a notification (shown below) in the Windows app. This of course assumes that they are still using the Windows app, and assumes that the Windows 365 Reserve Cloud PC is still in use.

Here’s the message in the Windows app, shown below.

Keep in mind that they may no longer be using the Windows app as the disaster that forced them to use their Windows 365 Reserve Cloud PC may have been solved after a few days, allowing them to re-use their physical laptop, so you cannot guarantee that the end user will even see this warning in the Windows app, and thus, if the admin does not deprovision the Windows 365 Reserve Cloud PC, it will expire.

Stopping the clock

As an Intune admin, to stop the clock from using up more of these 10 days, you would need to select each of the Windows 365 Reserve Cloud PC’s that are provisioned and in use, and deprovision them. Below is an example of the action on one of the Reserve Cloud PC’s.

After doing this action, the 10 day clock will stop ticking, meaning that you’ll still have usable days on that Windows 365 Reserve license for future needs in that time period (10 days per calendar year).

Licenses allow up to 10 days of Cloud PC access per year for one user.

Note: In case it’s not clear, if you do NOT deprovision your provisioned Windows 365 Reserve Cloud PC’s then they will keep running and use up all of those assigned 10 days. The only warning you’ll get is if you happen to be in the the Intune console looking at the Windows 365 Reserve provisioned Cloud PC’s, you’ll notice the 3 out of 10 days left warning.

After deprovisioning the Windows 365 Reserve Cloud PC, the provisioning status will change to Not provisioned and the days left will stay at what days you have left.

In previous posts on this subject I pointed out that you as the admin can allow the end user to provision, or even deprovision their Windows 365 Reserve Cloud PC by configuring settings in Intune to allow the end user to do these actions themselves (self-service) via the Windows app.

But you should be aware that if an end user wants to start deprovisioning their Windows 365 Reserve Cloud PC, the action to do so isn’t as straight forward as provisioning it (set up your cloud pc).

To illustrate this, look at the self service actions below for an end user to begin provisioning their own Windows 365 Reserve Cloud PC via the Windows app.

End user provisioning action

The end user provisioning action for a Windows 365 Reserve Cloud PC is referred to as Set up your Cloud PC and shown below.

followed by

once done, the Windows 365 Reserve Cloud PC will be available for use after the provisioning process is complete.

End user deprovisioning action

If you want your end users to also deprovision their Windows 365 Reserve Cloud PC after the disaster is over, then you’ll have to inform them to return it via the actions below.

First, the user needs to locate their Windows 365 Reserve cloud pc in the Windows app, and then click on the … (elipsees) settings icon. From there, click on Return as shown below.

This will prompt for confirmation, they need to agree to Delete all my saved data and return this Cloud PC.

Once confirmed, the returning process will begin (or deprovisioning).

This is a great way of empowering your end users to do the provisioning and deprovisioning actions themselves, but assumes that the users would actually be technically competent enough to do both. And to be honest, after whatever disaster prompted you to issue them these Reserve licenses in the first place is over, do you really think they’ll remember to deprovision (return) their Windows 365 Reserve Cloud PC ?

Summary

In the final part I took a closer look at what happens after the disaster is over and your users can begin using their physical devices again. You as the admin must remember to deprovision the provisioned Windows 365 Reserve Cloud PC’s when no longer in use otherwise you’ll lose out on remaining days available for the next disaster. It would be great if there was a reminder (Alert) that you could configure to remind the admin and/or Reserve users to deprovision (return) their Cloud PC’s after usage to save those unused days.

There is an alert related to deprovisioning Windows 365 Reserve Cloud PC’s but it only covers the eventuality of deprovisioning failing on the Reserve Cloud PC, not actually reminding you to deprovision them once not in use.

Your users can be educated to do this themselves but I would doubt that they’d remember to do so, once they regain access to their physical computer. Therefore it’s up to you the Intune admin to not only be proactive in selecting, provisioning and assigning Windows 365 reserve licenses in advance of a disaster scenario, but also to be reactive after the event and ‘clean up’ or deprovision the used Windows 365 Reserve Cloud PC’s. Failure to do so will mean that you’ll lose out on the remaining days and won’t have any reserve left for the next disaster scenario.

See you in the next one!