Has Windows 10 VDI Licensing changed yet?
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Looking at running Server 2016 RDSH (Terminal Server) for a small 10 person deployment. I keep reading about new options to run Server as a guest VDI, but has Windows 10 VDI changed so that you can purchase licenses in small quantities?
I see $32 VDI licenses for Windows 10 Pro and I dont closely following Microsoft licensing. I have always been a big Terminal Server fan, up until 2012 implemented the ridiculous full screen start menu.
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So first question first... why do you want VDI? Lots of good use cases for it, but lots of good ones against it. Why VDI instead of RDS?
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Server as VDI doesn't invoke MS VDI licensing, so there is nothing to do. Just buy server licenses as normal.
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@bigbear said in Has Windows 10 VDI Licensing changed yet?:
I see $32 VDI licenses for Windows 10 Pro ....
That doesn't sound right. Do you have a link to that license? VDI is super expensive, but you can do it with double copies of Windows 10 and Software Assurance.
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I am most interested in terminal services. I have a couple use cases for light Auto-Cad and thought I would give it a try. Have ran CAD on terminal services before well enough for viewing, but I thought Windows 10 in a VDI might offer some graphics benefits.
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@bigbear said in Has Windows 10 VDI Licensing changed yet?:
I am most interested in terminal services. I have a couple use cases for light Auto-Cad and thought I would give it a try. Have ran CAD on terminal services before well enough for viewing, but I thought Windows 10 in a VDI might offer some graphics benefits.
In some cases it can be beneficial, in some it is a negative. Depends on the use case.
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If RDS is all you want, just fire up RDS 2016 and you are done. Easy peasy.
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So you prefer terminal services over VDI?
Windows 2000, 2003, 2008 Terminal Services was my favorite setup for about 95% of all my needs. 2012 forced a lot of extra setup steps and the start menu killed it for me.
Hoping 2016 is better
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Also when I am in a RDP session with my windows 10 box I notice sounds, graphics work pretty well. I wander how 2016 terminal services will compare and assumed their might be some multimedia benefit.
Searching for that $32 license...
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@bigbear said in Has Windows 10 VDI Licensing changed yet?:
So you prefer terminal services over VDI?
Of course, VDI is just a kludge for situations where you are stuck running bad software that doesn't behave properly with the operating system. You never "want" VDI, it's always a brute force fallback to fix other problems. And it is a unique problem to the Windows world, there is a reason that no other ecosystem talks about VDI... because only Windows software is considered acceptable to have been written so poorly.
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@bigbear said in Has Windows 10 VDI Licensing changed yet?:
Also when I am in a RDP session with my windows 10 box I notice sounds, graphics work pretty well. I wander how 2016 terminal services will compare and assumed their might be some multimedia benefit.
Windows 10 and Server 2016 are the same product. So they should be identical.
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Keep in mind that Microsoft's VDI product uses Windows 10 and still uses RDS on top. So any complexity or complaints of RDS will come right along with you. VDI doesn't replace RDS, it just adds cost to it.
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I 100% agree about VDI, it's always about software that can't run on a terminal session.
Do you do a lot of terminal services? I can't help but to call it that still. I once though it was the future, thin clients and TS.
Is there a way to avoid running separate servers for the session gaelteway stuff that started in 2012
Also can it be run solely with Azure AD? It's gonna be a nice little Saturday of Vultr and RDS
Gonna
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@bigbear said in Has Windows 10 VDI Licensing changed yet?:
Do you do a lot of terminal services? I can't help but to call it that still. I once though it was the future, thin clients and TS.
It's anything but the future. It's a standard ebb and flow in IT. In fact, it's the most textbook one. Thin clients is all that we used to have. Then we got all excited and going to desktop computers was "the future." Then we went back to thin clients. Then we want back to desktops again. And on it goes.
Thin clients are certainly not "the future". They have been a standard component of the IT portfolio for decades. They are the past. They were not new in the 1990s, they were not exciting. They improve, but at the same time, so do desktops. In the real world, both have their place. There are things that thin clients make easy, but there are things that desktops do that they cannot.
In the real world, physical desktops, laptops, tablets and so forth have been and will be the staples of computing for a long time to come. There are not going anywhere and replacing them is not an industry momentum.
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@bigbear said in Has Windows 10 VDI Licensing changed yet?:
Also can it be run solely with Azure AD? It's gonna be a nice little Saturday of Vultr and RDS
Haven't tried that.
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One of the big things that causes swings between people wanting to be "all terminal" vs. "all desktop" is management. People argue that thin clients are easier to manage, but that is rapidly changing and they really are not. Not much, anyway.
Sometimes people think that they are cheaper, but in reality they normally cost a lot more and are a lot more complex. When you are dealing with thousands of them that are all identical, then thin clients can be cost effective. For just a few, they are very complex and expensive. You need scale to make them work and even the Fortune 100 only use them sometimes because they don't make all that much sense for normal workloads.
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What's the problem that you are trying to solve by looking at either RDS or VDI? Start there?
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@scottalanmiller said in Has Windows 10 VDI Licensing changed yet?:
@bigbear said in Has Windows 10 VDI Licensing changed yet?:
So you prefer terminal services over VDI?
Of course, VDI is just a kludge for situations where you are stuck running bad software that doesn't behave properly with the operating system. You never "want" VDI, it's always a brute force fallback to fix other problems. And it is a unique problem to the Windows world, there is a reason that no other ecosystem talks about VDI... because only Windows software is considered acceptable to have been written so poorly.
While I'm sure this thinking is incorrect, at the same time, when has Apple ever had a server based solution like this at all? I've never personally seen another solution besides RDS or VDI both involving windows... but I know 'nix can do this, just never seen an actual use of it.
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@Dashrender said in Has Windows 10 VDI Licensing changed yet?:
@scottalanmiller said in Has Windows 10 VDI Licensing changed yet?:
@bigbear said in Has Windows 10 VDI Licensing changed yet?:
So you prefer terminal services over VDI?
Of course, VDI is just a kludge for situations where you are stuck running bad software that doesn't behave properly with the operating system. You never "want" VDI, it's always a brute force fallback to fix other problems. And it is a unique problem to the Windows world, there is a reason that no other ecosystem talks about VDI... because only Windows software is considered acceptable to have been written so poorly.
While I'm sure this thinking is incorrect, at the same time, when has Apple ever had a server based solution like this at all? I've never personally seen another solution besides RDS or VDI both involving windows... but I know 'nix can do this, just never seen an actual use of it.
Right, the Mac world is a little tough to use as an example because they very much just do their own thing and it is more about what they let you do than what their users want to do.
But the UNIX world in general had terminal services AND VDI long before Windows did... and while it WAS used, it was never used very much because most of the time, it's a really silly thing. It has very little value.
You still need physical devices for end users, only now you need special case ones. So there really isn't a cost savings on hardware, especially once you consider the huge server side resources needed. It generally puts network usage through the roof as you are passing around all kinds of graphical data that you didn't need at all before. It makes everything so much more complex.
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@Dashrender said in Has Windows 10 VDI Licensing changed yet?:
@scottalanmiller said in Has Windows 10 VDI Licensing changed yet?:
@bigbear said in Has Windows 10 VDI Licensing changed yet?:
So you prefer terminal services over VDI?
Of course, VDI is just a kludge for situations where you are stuck running bad software that doesn't behave properly with the operating system. You never "want" VDI, it's always a brute force fallback to fix other problems. And it is a unique problem to the Windows world, there is a reason that no other ecosystem talks about VDI... because only Windows software is considered acceptable to have been written so poorly.
While I'm sure this thinking is incorrect, at the same time, when has Apple ever had a server based solution like this at all? I've never personally seen another solution besides RDS or VDI both involving windows... but I know 'nix can do this, just never seen an actual use of it.
Linux has had it for at least 20 years
