Everything That There Is To Know About VDI Licensing with Windows
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@Dashrender said:
When was VDA ever the only option? I thought SA always included it? When VDA was created, the features were added to SA at the same time (or so I thought).
Pretty sure until 2015, VDA was the only option. Since SA didn't cover your devices. You still needed a VDA license for every device you would use.
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@Dashrender said:
The last time I knew, EU was like $125 - $180, and SA was $130, combined that's $255-$310 for the first 2 years, then $130 every 2 years after. Wasn't VDA like $200/yr? maybe less?
VDA was $100/year/device. If you are doing things short term, VDA is and was cheaper. Chris mentions three years as the crossover point in December. Which is likely true. And who deploys VDI for under three years? Not many people. Someone, but not many.
VDA was really brutal when it meant that VDI was tied to a single end point. Pretty much defeated the point of VDI as there was no mobility.
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Leaving eveything else off the table, ridiculous or not, I proposed the following to Chris (GG)
ten Windows 10 Pro OEM PCs with accompanying ten EU + SA licenses
single Hyper-V Server 2012 R2 (not the service upgrade inside normal server) i.e. no Windows server license required at all running ten Windows 10 pro VMsConsidering the above, would I need any additional licensing?
his response was
I think you're missing the method of how you're delivering the VMs from the server to the client. Hyper-V is a free product to virtualize an OS, but it works along with RDS to deliver the VMs from the server to the devices. Given this, you have all the licensing options correct (Win Ent Upgrade w/SA) for the client, but you still need to figure out how your clients will interact with the VMs. As far as I understand it, Hyper-V wont deliver the VMs themselves, that's what you need to figure out and license accordingly.
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@Dashrender said:
Leaving eveything else off the table, ridiculous or not, I proposed the following to Chris (GG)
ten Windows 10 Pro OEM PCs with accompanying ten EU + SA licenses
single Hyper-V Server 2012 R2 (not the service upgrade inside normal server) i.e. no Windows server license required at all running ten Windows 10 pro VMsConsidering the above, would I need any additional licensing?
his response was
I think you're missing the method of how you're delivering the VMs from the server to the client. Hyper-V is a free product to virtualize an OS, but it works along with RDS to deliver the VMs from the server to the devices. Given this, you have all the licensing options correct (Win Ent Upgrade w/SA) for the client, but you still need to figure out how your clients will interact with the VMs. As far as I understand it, Hyper-V wont deliver the VMs themselves, that's what you need to figure out and license accordingly.
Right, Hyper-V doesn't do it. It doesn't need to. Each of your VMs handles the RDP themselves. There is no problem to solve here, unless you are implying one that you don't mention.
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How I read that concern:
I have a car, I'd like to go to the store, will the road support my car?
A: Yes, the road supports cars. But you've not mentioned how you want to drive, you'll need a vehicle.
Um, okay, but I have a car, I'll just drive that.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
Leaving eveything else off the table, ridiculous or not, I proposed the following to Chris (GG)
ten Windows 10 Pro OEM PCs with accompanying ten EU + SA licenses
single Hyper-V Server 2012 R2 (not the service upgrade inside normal server) i.e. no Windows server license required at all running ten Windows 10 pro VMsConsidering the above, would I need any additional licensing?
his response was
I think you're missing the method of how you're delivering the VMs from the server to the client. Hyper-V is a free product to virtualize an OS, but it works along with RDS to deliver the VMs from the server to the devices. Given this, you have all the licensing options correct (Win Ent Upgrade w/SA) for the client, but you still need to figure out how your clients will interact with the VMs. As far as I understand it, Hyper-V wont deliver the VMs themselves, that's what you need to figure out and license accordingly.
Right, Hyper-V doesn't do it. It doesn't need to. Each of your VMs handles the RDP themselves. There is no problem to solve here, unless you are implying one that you don't mention.
Chris is implying that there is a problem to solve - the VM's (though his implication) can't do it themselves, at least not for free. If they do it, you have to pay for it - what we don't know right now.. is how. Of course if you were using Citrix or Vmware's products, then you'd be paying for their remote access connection, but we're talking about MS's connection option. He's seeming to think something needs to be here, but doesn't know what.
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The thing that is happening, that no one is willing to say (I'm 98% sure on that) is that most people take VDI and layer on assumptions about what that includes (just like how people use the term virtualization but mean consolidation) to mean things that VDI does not imply. One of the most common things is to mean an additional management system for the VDI hosts. This is common and very useful but it is not part of VDI and not required in any way.
One way that this is handled is with RDS. Another is with XenDesktop. Small shops often do nothing. It's purely optional.
But since so many people just assume that every VDI deployment is going to have a "special" VDI management system, they start lumping that cost, overheard and licensing into VDI discussions without saying that they are, or why, and VDI turns from simple into confusing.
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@scottalanmiller said:
How I read that concern:
I have a car, I'd like to go to the store, will the road support my car?
A: Yes, the road supports cars. But you've not mentioned how you want to drive, you'll need a vehicle.
Um, okay, but I have a car, I'll just drive that.
to use your analogy - according to Chris, someone has to pay for the road - the road is NEVER free.
Of course we use RDC (which uses the RDP protocol) because it's built it, and you're assuming it's free - but Chris doesn't seem to think so.. and really at this point I have no idea if it is or not.
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@Dashrender said:
Chris is implying that there is a problem to solve - the VM's (though his implication) can't do it themselves,
Nope, he didn't imply that. Like a good salesman he let you imply that yourself.
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@scottalanmiller said:
The thing that is happening, that no one is willing to say (I'm 98% sure on that) is that most people take VDI and layer on assumptions about what that includes (just like how people use the term virtualization but mean consolidation) to mean things that VDI does not imply. One of the most common things is to mean an additional management system for the VDI hosts. This is common and very useful but it is not part of VDI and not required in any way.
One way that this is handled is with RDS. Another is with XenDesktop. Small shops often do nothing. It's purely optional.
But since so many people just assume that every VDI deployment is going to have a "special" VDI management system, they start lumping that cost, overheard and licensing into VDI discussions without saying that they are, or why, and VDI turns from simple into confusing.
OOOOK I think you might have just hit the nail on the head!
I dig it!
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@Dashrender said:
Of course if you were using Citrix or Vmware's products, then you'd be paying for their remote access connection, but we're talking about MS's connection option. He's seeming to think something needs to be here, but doesn't know what.
Nope, that's not how that works either. This has nothing whatsoever to do with virtualization, it has to do with a misunderstanding of RDS. If you use XenApp in a case where XenApp is needed, RDS is needed to. You can't replace RDS with another technology, RDS licensing applies to use cases, not technologies.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
Of course if you were using Citrix or Vmware's products, then you'd be paying for their remote access connection, but we're talking about MS's connection option. He's seeming to think something needs to be here, but doesn't know what.
Nope, that's not how that works either. This has nothing whatsoever to do with virtualization, it has to do with a misunderstanding of RDS. If you use XenApp in a case where XenApp is needed, RDS is needed to. You can't replace RDS with another technology, RDS licensing applies to use cases, not technologies.
This I understand!
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@Dashrender said:
Of course we use RDC (which uses the RDP protocol) because it's built it, and you're assuming it's free - but Chris doesn't seem to think so.. and really at this point I have no idea if it is or not.
He never implies that. He definitely never says it. He only says that Hyper-V doesn't do it and that you'll have to decide how to do it.
That you don't have a super obvious answer that is free isn't pointed out to you, he pointed out that you have to make a choice. Like in my car example, you COULD choose to buy a new car, he wants to sell cars, so he leaves the option to do so open. He lets you imagine that he mentioned it for a reason - that you need a car. You don't. He mentioned it so that you would start picturing yourself in a new car.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
Of course we use RDC (which uses the RDP protocol) because it's built it, and you're assuming it's free - but Chris doesn't seem to think so.. and really at this point I have no idea if it is or not.
He never implies that. He definitely never says it. He only says that Hyper-V doesn't do it and that you'll have to decide how to do it.
That you don't have a super obvious answer that is free isn't pointed out to you, he pointed out that you have to make a choice. Like in my car example, you COULD choose to buy a new car, he wants to sell cars, so he leaves the option to do so open. He lets you imagine that he mentioned it for a reason - that you need a car. You don't. He mentioned it so that you would start picturing yourself in a new car.
I wonder if he is aware of the free option? Perhaps not? or he's just being completely coy when I'm asking.
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In the SMB, it's actually pretty practical for VDI to mean ten Windows 10 VMs running on a single server. They are all independent, do their own thing, and ten users each get one of them assigned to them. Easy peasy. It's Windows 10 so RDP is included in the technology stack and VDI SA licensing is specifically the right to access those VMs in that way.
Nothing more needed. This is actually how most SMBs picture VDI working until people start implying more things to sell to them.
What enterprises do is they layer things like RDS, XenDesktop, View or whatever on top of the VDI to provide things like "auto-provisioning" of the VMs, shared gold source image to reduce storage needs, web based access gateways and similar. Things that spin VMs up and down as load is needed. Things that are amazing - but have essentially no value in the SMB world. At least not most of the time.
All of that is just overhead that you don't need to worry about.
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@Dashrender said:
I wonder if he is aware of the free option? Perhaps not? or he's just being completely coy when I'm asking.
He definitely knows. He also assumes that people looking at VDI are thinking VDI as all the marketers push it. Which involves all these bells and whistles that aren't actually part of VDI itself.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
I wonder if he is aware of the free option? Perhaps not? or he's just being completely coy when I'm asking.
He definitely knows. He also assumes that people looking at VDI are thinking VDI as all the marketers push it. Which involves all these bells and whistles that aren't actually part of VDI itself.
God damned sales people!
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Think about virtualization. Ask questions about virtualization and immediately people will assume that you have to be talking about high availability (even if you never had it before and you are stepping up in reliability), that you must have image based hypervisor level backups (saw this one just today), that you are doing this for compute consolidation (saw that assumption today too.) People do the same thing with VDI. You can't mean VDI and not mean VMware View with PCoIP protocol, automated provisioning, high availability and shared storage with image dedupe, right?
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lol - yeah I know.. I've been guilty of some of that in the past.
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@Dashrender said:
God damned sales people!
Remember... always read what he says. He never says anything wrong. He says very straightforward statements like: "HyperV doesn't support this."
But if we stop and thing... why would we think that it did? It was never part of the equation. It's like a middle school word problem in math: "Jane has five apples. Bob has a banana. Jim has six apples. If Jane eats two apples and Jim slaps Jane, how many bananas does Bob have?"
It's all misdirection. None of it is wrong, it's just extra information. Filter out the stuff that doesn't apply and Chris' statements were very straightforward. Basically you have to choose how you want to connect.
That's all. And you do have to choose. You can manage each machine individually like you did with physical machines and connect over plain, old RDP. You can use RealVNC and go that route. You can use Hyper-V and RDS to do some cool new stuff. It's all up to you.
