Updated on the 25 of September 2022 due to new functionality released to downgrade Cloud PCs
As you might know, the size of a Cloud PC is based on the license you have purchased and assigned to a user. However, sometimes you might assign a too small machine for a user which is causing performance issues for them. It could also be the other way around, that the user has a too powerful machine, which drives an increased cost for your organisation.
How your Cloud PC is performing is measured and presented to you under Reports > Endpoint Analytics in the Microsoft Endpoint Manager admin center (MEM). The report called Resource performance will show you how your Cloud PCs are performing, and if you need to upgrade any of them. (Note that it will take up to 24 hours before you can see data on your Cloud PC)
As you can see, the top two machines have a very low performance score, and if you look at the individual machines they have different needs for an upgrade, one needs more RAM and the other a better CPU.
There are however two caveats to re-sizing a machine.
- You can upgrade or downgrade (
only upgrade, not downgrade) - If you are using group-based licensing, this does not work
- You can not resize Azure AD joined Cloud PCs
The benefit to resizing a Cloud PC compared to just assigning a larger license to the user is that the Cloud PC will remain, just the specification will be upgraded. So all user data is preserved, however, the user will get kicked out of the session while the resizing is happening.
Resize a Cloud PC
Resizing a machine is really simple, you simply navigate to the device in MEM and click the “Resize (preview)” button in the ribbon.
When you have clicked this button, a fly-out menu will open to the left showing you the different sizes. You will be able to see all sizes, but you can only select and apply the size that you have licenses for, so if you select a size you don’t have licenses for it will show an error message as in the picture below and you cannot continue.
You can upgrade vCPU, RAM, and disk space. However, you are limited to only downgrading vCPU and RAM, disk space will not be possible to decrease.
When you have selected the new license through the resizing portal and clicked Resize, the machine will re-provision itself which will take a while.
Once the machine has been reprovisioned, you will notice that you have the same stuff on your Cloud PC as before the resizing but with a different configuration.
