Everything That There Is To Know About VDI Licensing with Windows
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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.
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Yes I figured he was being coy - never answering or denying my inquiry... it was frustrating..
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@scottalanmiller said:
Basically you have to choose how you want to connect.
Right but when asked what the options were - he only mentioned Citrix, or VMWare View or RDS.. never mentioned the free included option. that's the crap part. If you didn't know about it already, how are you suppose to find out about it? Why would you assume that what worked from a physical setup translated to a VM one at all - I ask because MS changes the rules a lot when talking about VMs.
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@Dashrender said:
Yes I figured he was being coy - never answering or denying my inquiry... it was frustrating..
MS always does that with licensing in general.
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@Dashrender said:
that's the crap part. If you didn't know about it already, how are you suppose to find out about it?
Well, to be fair, Microsoft kind of expects people who are running Windows desktops to be aware of RDP. It is their standard protocol for everything. They make quite a big point of making sure that their users and customers know about it. They push it big time in everything that they do.
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@Dashrender said:
Why would you assume that what worked from a physical setup translated to a VM one at all - I ask because MS changes the rules a lot when talking about VMs.
Because....
- No technology changed.
- They never stated that there was a new limitation now.
- You just licensed this very access. It's the right to use that RDP that you just paid for.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
Yes I figured he was being coy - never answering or denying my inquiry... it was frustrating..
MS always does that with licensing in general.
why? so they can sue you later when you do it wrong? Hell, he won't even give me pricing - pushing me off on my vendor/reseller... another situation where you should be able to get complete full honest answers, and yet, never do.
Basically you're saying that either A - I must spend insane amounts of time reading over all of their documentation hoping I understand it, with no possibility of asking for clarification (at least not before I'm hauled in front of a judge) and buy based on that - OR
Hire someone who has done exactly that and is now selling their expertise in this knowledge.This just seems morally wrong. If you call a company (the one who makes the product) and you ask them point blank for ALL options - why would you not get them? again save for the fact that they want you to spend your life reading their options and figuring it out yourself.
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@Dashrender said:
why? so they can sue you later when you do it wrong?
Why not? Less sueing and more auditing. But why give away so much when there is a huge MS partner industry built around MS not doing this for free. A huge number of people are employed just through this one aspect of MS' business. Auditors, license advisors, the BSA....
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@Dashrender said:
This just seems morally wrong. If you call a company (the one who makes the product) and you ask them point blank for ALL options - why would you not get them?
Because you aren't paying for that advice
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@scottalanmiller said:
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.
In this scenario of "ten Windows 10 VMs running on a single server":
- The hypervisor is irrelevant. You could use XenServer/HyperV/KVM etc
- The 10x VMs need to be licensed via SA or 10x Win 10 Pro lic + 10x Win VDA lic
- You can then connect remotely to the VMs using plain, 'ol, free RDP
- No reason to get into RDS & all other BS except you want to pay MS extra $$
Am I understanding this correctly
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@FATeknollogee said:
@scottalanmiller said:
In the SMB, it's actually pretty practical for VDI to mean ten Windows 10 VMs running on a single server. They are all independent, do their own thing, and ten users each get one of them assigned to them. Easy peasy. It's Windows 10 so RDP is included in the technology stack and VDI SA licensing is specifically the right to access those VMs in that way.
Nothing more needed. This is actually how most SMBs picture VDI working until people start implying more things to sell to them.
What enterprises do is they layer things like RDS, XenDesktop, View or whatever on top of the VDI to provide things like "auto-provisioning" of the VMs, shared gold source image to reduce storage needs, web based access gateways and similar. Things that spin VMs up and down as load is needed. Things that are amazing - but have essentially no value in the SMB world. At least not most of the time.
All of that is just overhead that you don't need to worry about.
In this scenario of "ten Windows 10 VMs running on a single server":
- The hypervisor is irrelevant. You could use XenServer/HyperV/KVM etc
- The 10x VMs need to be licensed via SA or 10x Win 10 Pro lic + 10x Win VDA lic
- You can then connect remotely to the VMs using plain, 'ol, free RDP
- No reason to get into RDS & all other BS except you want to pay MS extra $$
Am I understanding this correctly
Small tweak
2) the 10x Vms need to be licensed via Enterprise upgrade + SA or VDAyou don't need a Win10 Pro license as you mention - that's included in the VDA, which is renewed yearly, FYI.
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@Dashrender said:
Small tweak
2) the 10x Vms need to be licensed via Enterprise upgrade + SA or VDAyou don't need a Win10 Pro license as you mention - that's included in the VDA, which is renewed yearly, FYI.
I believe you need both the Win 10 Pro (list price $199) + Win 10 VDA (list $125)
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Is the VDA a yearly occurence (as in pay per year) or it's a one time deal?
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@FATeknollogee said:
@scottalanmiller said:
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.
In this scenario of "ten Windows 10 VMs running on a single server":
- The hypervisor is irrelevant. You could use XenServer/HyperV/KVM etc
- The 10x VMs need to be licensed via SA or 10x Win 10 Pro lic + 10x Win VDA lic
- You can then connect remotely to the VMs using plain, 'ol, free RDP
- No reason to get into RDS & all other BS except you want to pay MS extra $$
Am I understanding this correctly
All seems correct.
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@FATeknollogee said:
Is the VDA a yearly occurence (as in pay per year) or it's a one time deal?
Annual. that's what makes it so brutal.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@FATeknollogee said:
Is the VDA a yearly occurence (as in pay per year) or it's a one time deal?
Annual. that's what makes it so brutal.
Wow, I thought it was a one-time deal.
SA spread over a 2 or 3 year period is def a "better" deal?
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but you have to renew SA whenever it expires as well.
VDI is a subscription no matter what.
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@FATeknollogee said:
SA spread over a 2 or 3 year period is def a "better" deal?
On average, yes, But they are not dramatically different like they used to be.
