Everything That There Is To Know About VDI Licensing with Windows
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None of this is to suggest that Windows isn't right for a lot of companies, that people attempt to make good decisions and fail, that factors change over time, etc. I'm just saying that if you feel people are choosing it for reasons other than feeling it is good for their business or they have been threatened in some way... then really, stealing from the company (through laziness, through kickbacks, etc.) appears to be the only thing that we could be stating about them.
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Funny this topic is here, because I'm now looking at VDI and wondering why the hell anyone would consider it.
Server 2012 R2 with TS CAL for 30 people is 1/3 the cost of just the Desktop licensing. Not even including the bump in hardware to run it or anything else. Just desktop licensing..
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@DustinB3403 said:
Funny this topic is here, because I'm now looking at VDI and wondering why the hell anyone would consider it.
There are use cases, but they are niche. It's for generally large environments, with a heavy Windows investment, that are tied to the desktop versions of the OS and cannot use RDS. There are exceptions to that, but that is, more or less, the intended audience.
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@DustinB3403 said:
Server 2012 R2 with TS CAL for 30 people is 1/3 the cost of just the Desktop licensing. Not even including the bump in hardware to run it or anything else. Just desktop licensing..
Sort of, you still need physical desktops. Windows desktop licensing is just part of the hardware (in essentially all cases) so it isn't a cost that can be easily compared to something else.
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Or do you mean the RDS vs. Windows 10 Ent + SA cost?
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RDS to a virtual Server 2012 r2 running our "user applications" office 365 and such
vs "traditional" VDI as Citrix would sell it.
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@DustinB3403 said:
RDS to a virtual Server 2012 r2 running our "user applications" office 365 and such
vs "traditional" VDI as Citrix would sell it.
Okay, so just RDS vs. VDI licensing.
Citrix doesn't sell vanilla VDI, they only sell XenDesktop which is a big VDI management system on top of vanilla VDI.
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Citrix "big" product is XenApp which is actually a direct replacement for RDS and isn't VDI at all. RDS is actually XenApp under the hood with high end features striped out. MS buys it from Citrix.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Citrix "big" product is XenApp which is actually a direct replacement for RDS and isn't VDI at all. RDS is actually XenApp under the hood with high end features striped out. MS buys it from Citrix.
I thought MS and Citrix parted ways on that stuff a while ago, each doing their own development?
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@Dashrender said:
I thought MS and Citrix parted ways on that stuff a while ago, each doing their own development?
Maybe, but it's XenApp as the original base code. Just like SQL Server was purchased code from Sybase and Windows NT was OS/2.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
I thought MS and Citrix parted ways on that stuff a while ago, each doing their own development?
Maybe, but it's XenApp as the original base code. Just like SQL Server was purchased code from Sybase and Windows NT was OS/2.
Yeah, that's definitely the case.
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Yeah what I'm foreseeing we're going to need is a simple way for our employees to access a setup, ready to go system after connecting to the network that has their email and document creative softwares.
Which IMO is traditional RDS.
VDI just doesn't fit in with where we need it.
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Dustin, something to consider when looking at RDS vs VDI too is what will the user use to connect to the session with?
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@scottalanmiller said:
@FATeknollogee said:
What a racket MS has going!!
Only sort of. You are always free to use RDS for remote Windows usage. Or to use Linux desktops VDI or terminal servers. You are never trapped with MS. So no matter what they charge, it's not really unfair as there is no lock in. Expensive, yes but their customers choose them because they think that it is a good investment.
What is Linux desktop VDI?
I assume there's no way to run a Windows app using the Linux VDI mechanism? -
@FATeknollogee said:
What is Linux desktop VDI?
I assume there's no way to run a Windows app using the Linux VDI mechanism?VDI just means a one to one virtualized system rather than a shared one.
Shared is terminal servers (many users to one OS.)
VDI is one user per OS.
So you can do either model with any OS you want. Windows terminal server is called RDS. All Linux are terminal servers out of the box. You can do VDI with Linux just as you can with Windows, it's identical.
Using Linux as your desktop does not allow you to run Windows apps. It's a Linux desktop, same as using a Linux desktop anywhere.
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@NTG has multiple terminal servers, all Linux.
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If your application is Windows only, then you're kinda "stuck" with MS...
OTOH, if your app will install in Windows or Linux, one would have a lot more to choose from. -
@FATeknollogee said:
If your application is Windows only, then you're kinda "stuck" with MS...
You can always choose to change the application. While painful, it is often the better solution.
Especially as nearly any application that requires a specific OS isn't just unnecessarily expensive or limiting, but having an OS dependency means it is mired in a 1990s and older software design paradigm. Modern business software made even since the mid-1990s only very rarely has OS dependencies. That's quite literally a DOS-era problem.
There are exceptions to this, but they are very rare. Nearly all "stuck on Windows" problems are caused by archaic software and companies that are happy to use software that doesn't come up to incredibly low standards.
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@scottalanmiller said:
There are exceptions to this, but they are very rare. Nearly all "stuck on Windows" problems are caused by archaic software and companies that are happy to use software that doesn't come up to incredibly low standards.
Unfortunately, there's a boatload of the "stuck on Windows" type apps
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@FATeknollogee said:
Unfortunately, there's a boatload of the "stuck on Windows" type apps
There are, of course. But that apps are stuck on Windows doesn't mean that a company should be. The question becomes... why is the company stuck on those apps?
Think of the cost involved. It isn't Windows, that's one aspect, but the same bad software that causes this to happen is likely causing lots of other issues. And is there support? If the app is supported, why isn't it getting moved to a modern design (it's been two decades, the buffer period for excuses is really over.)
There are special cases, of course. But it's pretty rare that I find companies actually stuck. Maybe the software makes sense, maybe it doesn't. But the notion of being stuck on Windows I find to generally not be the case. It's more that companies don't want to face the pain of moving.
And that pain of change is why Microsoft keeps the prices high - because companies would rather pay a bounty there than to bother rethinking how they do things.
