Update to 2.2

Tip

You can only upgrade to Version 2.2 from 2.1. If you have an older version you need to upgrade to 2.1 first or install a new addon.

This is a minor version update of Schoolyear AVD and thus no major migration steps need to be taken. You can learn more about our versioning policy here. Migrating from 2.1 should be easy with the necessary permissions, and your currently deployed images will not be affected. The only changes related to 2.1 are 4 new resources:

• Function App
• App Registration for Function App authentication
• Custom Azure role
• Backup Storage Account

You can read more on the Function App and its purpose in the Architecture Overview page.

Features

Amongst some future-proofing and stability updates, version 2.2 introduces 3 new features.

Automatic cleanup of Entra Devices

We introduce a Function App to programmatically add devices to a Security Group when students start an exam. This replaces the previous Dynamic Group. A nice perk of this approach is that at the end of an exam we can automatically cleanup these devices. As a result, successful exams no longer leave orphaned resources.

Service Control A.10 was updated from once every 3 months to once every 6 months.

Student file backup

At the end of every exam, Schoolyear AVD will automatically back up student files to a dedicated Backup Storage Account deployed in your base resource group. By default, the Documents, Downloads, and Desktop folders will be backed up. Custom layers can extend this list using backup_config_patterns in properties.json5. Files will be retained for 30 days (configurable) and are accessible to teachers and administrators via the Schoolyear dashboard.

See the Student file backup page for full details.

Note

To enable student file backup on your existing images, you need to rebuild them using avdcli version 2.2.0 or later. Newly built images will include backup support automatically.

Custom VM Login Role Assignment

We’ve reduced the necessary number of role assignment calls from 2 to 1 by creating a custom VM role assignment, dramatically reducing the load on Azure during large exam starts. This roughly translates in twice as fast onboarding of students. Azure has a hard cap of 4000 role assignments per subscription so this also doubles the allowed number of students that are able to participate in exams in a single AVD Add-on installation.

Steps for updating

Updating from version 2.1 to version 2.2 involves the following steps:

1. Go to your Schoolyear dashboard, select your Secure Apps Console and go to the AVD Add-ons tab.
2. Find your version 2.1 AVD add-on and click on it.
3. On the top right corner you will see an Upgrade now button, click on it.
4. You will be prompted to follow a similar (but much quicker) process as you would be installing a fresh instance of the AVD Addon. You will only be asked to deploy and configure the new resources introduced in version 2.2. Any resources previously installed in the 2.1 version of the Addon will remain intact and won’t need re-deployment.
5. Save the add-on.