Microsoft announced Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD) at their Ignite conference in late 2018 (WVD is now GA as of 9/30/2019 so contact us for more information on how you can potentially save 65% with WVD over your existing VDI deployment). We knew the announcements would be interesting to our clients running VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure), but we wanted to see more before we started discussing it with our clients. Now that more information has become public, we thought it was good time to start getting this out there.
Also as a result of constant updates, we will continue to revise this blog with information as it becomes public.
Our opinion… It isn’t that Microsoft never embraced virtual desktops/applications, it is just that it made money without even focusing on trying to sell it. Citrix, VMware, Nutanix, AWS and others all did the heavy lifting for them by selling the concept to customers and Microsoft reaped the benefit of OS licensing, Office licensing, VDA CALs, RDSH CALs, and other CALs. Now that Microsoft wants to get customers to consume more Azure resources, the VDI computing model is a means to an end for Microsoft. “More Azure consumption!” You’ll see how they do that and why we think Microsoft loves VDI now.
Microsoft WVD is management control plane service managed by Microsoft hosted in Azure that brokers access to Azure hosted instances. Image management, profile management, and virtual disks (for offline caching and other items) are available via the Azure portal and Powershell commands.
Using the picture below, WVD is the middle section that is managed and controlled by Microsoft in Azure. Clients (Windows, MacOS, HTML5, Android) on the left are managed by your organization. The Azure VMs on the right, accessible to users via WVD, are hosted in your Azure subscription along with your user profile/offline caching technology (FSLogix acquisition for optimizing the Office 365 ProPlus experience).
The biggest caveat to WVD is it DOES NOT include the Azure consumption cost for resources (CPU/memory, network egress, GPU and storage). Sizing of instances, sizing of storage and network consumption are going to be use case specific and client specific based on your applications, your users, and the Azure region hosting the instances.
e360 Pro Tip : When calculating your Azure resource consumption costs, leverage the Linux instances since the OS is included with WVD (See “How is it licensed?”)
Watch the WVD experience:
WVD includes the managed control plane service and the OS licensing itself. However it does not include your Azure resource consumption costs which are application, user and Azure region dependent.
e360 Pro Tip : e360 has recently hired Microsoft Licensing specialists that can help you optimize your Microsoft spend and possibly reduce your total spend with Microsoft.
Example: Microsoft 365 includes Office 365, Windows 10 and can possibly consolidate the the Analytics, Security, Management and Identity Management tools you have been acquiring from other vendors.
The licensing you select to purchase will result in which OS and which user experience is available (i.e. virtual apps or virtual desktop).
*7/31/2019 : Microsoft 365 E3/E5 or VDA per User Licensing is required to utilize non-Windows Pro endpoints to access Windows 7 or 10 with Windows Virtual Desktop.
** e360 Pro Tip : The end of Extended Support for Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2 is Jan 2020. If you need to run Windows 7 or Windows 2008 R2 (or SQL 2008/2008 R2/Windows Server 2008 for that matter) but don’t want to pay the hefty price tag of Extended Security Updates (available through Jan 2023), then you can run Windows 7 or Windows 2008 R2 in Azure with WVD (as long as you have one of the licensed options above).
Yes. The End User Computing community has been looking for this for years. The full support of running Windows 10 with the benefits of density with multi-session. App developers and vendors won’t need to test for desktop OS and server OS compatibility any longer!
Only downside with Windows 10 multi-session, is it only is available in Azure. It isn’t available for on-premises deployments and it is not available for any other cloud provider. Could this change eventually? Who knows, but it only runs in Azure for now.
Pro tip: As always when determining density, you should test with your applications and your users to determine the correct instance size and number of users per Windows 10 multi-session workload. There will be published documents on sizing for WVD and Windows 10 multi-session, but your usage may (probably will) vary on applications and users.
Currently Citrix Cloud is the only solution that has announced support for Microsoft WVD based desktops in Azure. This option would let you broker to alternate public cloud based desktops or to your on-premises desktops to deliver hybrid multi-cloud support for virtual desktops/applications. This would also allow you to replace the protocol used for enhanced support of multimedia (Microsoft Teams or Cisco Teams support), enhanced options for application layering/image management/environment management, and additional enhancements for security, reporting, and analytics.
We expect other brokers to be supported but at this time only Citrix Cloud has been officially announced (check back for updates).
It’s available as of September 30th, 2019.
If you would like to work with e360 on a Proof of Concept or Pilot of WVD, please reach out to us. Learn how you you might be able to save up to 65% over your current VDI deployment.
