Tuesday, March 20, 2012

The Microsoft Virtual Desktop Licensing Conundrum

Typically, large established software companies take a long time to alter their licensing and pricing to accommodate new models of use or methods of deployment. Just as many companies initially refused to support or license their server software in a virtual environment, before eventually softening their position and in many cases re-working their license agreements to support or encourage server virtualisation, the same is true of VDI. The matter of reviewing licensing is made more difficult and slower by virtue of the fact that there is only 1 desktop Operating System provider who completely dominates the market.

While the importance of desktop OS choice is probably declining (in the face of application virtualisation, google apps, and tablet or embedded devices which to the user appear to “have no OS"), the case is currently that Microsoft completely controls the desktop. They feel less pressure to do anything with licensing than they did in the server market, where they had real competition.
360is recently reviewed the situation with Microsoft OS licensing for a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure service provider. Through our discussions with Microsoft, Citrix, and other software vendors we were able to unscramble the (current) conundrum around Microsoft desktop Operating System licensing in a VDI environment.

For an extract from the licensing section from our report "Multi-tenant Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Design" Read More.

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