Well it is the World Partner Conference in New Orleans this week, and we thought we would share some of the useful information being delivered from Microsoft starting with this announcement.
Typically when clients look to VDI to assess viability and ROI there are a number of questions that are raised such as:
- Which Hypervisor
- How do I managed this environment
- How do I provide a broker to the desktop
- How can I strip the applications from the desktop
- How can I ensure performance and scalability.
But one of the areas that has been limiting adoption is licensing from Microsoft and is seen as one of the hidden costs of deployment.
We Microsoft have just announced two new license models for VDI - Microsoft Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Standard and Microsoft Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Premium. This new license model will be available in Q4 via volume licensing to dovetail with the release of Windows 2008 R2 and SCVMM R2 - want to see this technology in action before the release date, click here.
So what is included in the suites??
Firstly both offerings include licenses for all key components: Hyper-V, SCVMM,SCCM, SCOM, Remote Desktop Services CAL, and MDOP. The premium suites includes App-V for RDS allowing for a mixed mode environment of traditional SBC and VDI.
With these two new offerings, the only additional license you will need to correctly license a VDI environment from Microsoft is Virtual Enterprise Centralised Desktop or VECD (you will need VECD even to deploy VDI on a non-Microsoft platform).
Will let you know more when we do.