AVD Sign-In from DellOS Thin Clients takes 18 seconds

Question

AVD Sign-In from DellOS Thin Clients takes 18 seconds

Not So Magical 21

Is anyone running Azure Virtual Desktop on thin clients with a badge-in solution such as Imprivata?

We are trying to benchmark session launch times for roaming users.

Our current experience:

First login: about 30 seconds because a new session has to start
Roaming login to an existing session: about 18 seconds

Roaming login breakdown:

User badges in and the Entra authentication window opens about 1 second
Entra authentication completes about 10 seconds
The AVD broker connects the user to their desktop about 7 seconds

Our vendors are telling us that 18 seconds is normal for AVD, but we want to compare that against real-world environments with more AVD experience.

To clarify, the entire 18-second delay occurs on the thin-client side before the user reaches the AVD desktop. Slowest part is getting through Entra Auth screen. Conditional Access logs look normal, and the BIOS, ThinOS firmware, and AVD package are all fully updated.

What login times are others seeing with ThinOS, Imprivata, and AVD? Is anyone running Azure Virtual Desktop on thin clients with a badge-in solution such as Imprivata?

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Answer 1

Hello NSM,

An 18-second reconnect to an existing AVD session isn't inherently abnormal, especially when the authentication flow includes ThinOS + Imprivata + Microsoft Entra ID + the AVD broker. Based on your breakdown, the largest contributor appears to be the ~10-second Entra authentication, not the broker connection itself.

To better isolate the delay, I'd recommend checking:

AVD Connection Diagnostics to measure broker connection, feed retrieval, and session host connection times.
Microsoft Entra sign-in logs for Conditional Access evaluation time, MFA, Identity Protection, or token acquisition latency, even if no failures are reported.
Imprivata logs to determine whether badge authentication or SSO token issuance is introducing additional latency before Entra authentication begins.
Test from a Windows client using the Remote Desktop client/Web client against the same AVD host pool. If sign-in is significantly faster, that would point toward the ThinOS client or its authentication integration rather than AVD itself.
Verify you're running the latest Dell ThinOS firmware and AVD package, as performance improvements for Web Account Manager (WAM) and Entra authentication are included in newer releases.

Since the broker portion is only taking around 7 seconds, I'd focus first on the authentication path rather than the AVD infrastructure. If possible, collect an AVD Connection Diagnostics report and correlate it with the Entra sign-in logs for the same session. They usually make it much easier to pinpoint where the time is being spent.

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