Microsoft has tried to improve its licensing policies gradually over the past several years, says Dai Vu, the company’s director of virtualization product management. “Licensing and virtualization are inherently complex, and we’ve actually done a number of things to simplify it,” he says. In March 2010, Microsoft announced changes to its virtual desktop licensing policies that went into effect July 1. Here are the two most significant updates:
Eased virtual desktop licensing requirements. Previously, customers had to purchase an additional license, called a Virtual Enterprise Centralized Desktop (VECD) license, to run any Windows desktop operating system as a server-hosted desktop. The VECD cost $23 per device per year for computers covered by Windows Client Software Assurance (SA). For those not covered by SA, the cost was $110 per device per year.
Now Microsoft has done away with the VECD and is including virtual desktop access rights as a benefit of SA. For computers not covered by SA, Microsoft has created a new license, called the Virtual Desktop Access (VDA) license, which costs $100 per device per year.
In addition, if you’re running the virtual desktop on a thin client rather than a PC, that also requires a VDA license at $100 per device per year (and this applies to SA customers as well, since thin clients cannot be covered under SA).
Liberalized roaming rights. Previously, Microsoft licenses didn’t allow customers to access a specific virtual desktop from anything but their own Windows-licensed corporate PCs. The only way for a user to legally access her virtual desktop from a home PC was to buy a VECD license.
Now, under Client SA and the new VDA license, customers can access their virtual desktops and Microsoft Office applications hosted on VDI technology from other, noncorporate computers.
