Everything That There Is To Know About VDI Licensing with Windows
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The thing that is happening, that no one is willing to say (I'm 98% sure on that) is that most people take VDI and layer on assumptions about what that includes (just like how people use the term virtualization but mean consolidation) to mean things that VDI does not imply. One of the most common things is to mean an additional management system for the VDI hosts. This is common and very useful but it is not part of VDI and not required in any way.
One way that this is handled is with RDS. Another is with XenDesktop. Small shops often do nothing. It's purely optional.
But since so many people just assume that every VDI deployment is going to have a "special" VDI management system, they start lumping that cost, overheard and licensing into VDI discussions without saying that they are, or why, and VDI turns from simple into confusing.
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@scottalanmiller said:
How I read that concern:
I have a car, I'd like to go to the store, will the road support my car?
A: Yes, the road supports cars. But you've not mentioned how you want to drive, you'll need a vehicle.
Um, okay, but I have a car, I'll just drive that.
to use your analogy - according to Chris, someone has to pay for the road - the road is NEVER free.
Of course we use RDC (which uses the RDP protocol) because it's built it, and you're assuming it's free - but Chris doesn't seem to think so.. and really at this point I have no idea if it is or not.
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@Dashrender said:
Chris is implying that there is a problem to solve - the VM's (though his implication) can't do it themselves,
Nope, he didn't imply that. Like a good salesman he let you imply that yourself.
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@scottalanmiller said:
The thing that is happening, that no one is willing to say (I'm 98% sure on that) is that most people take VDI and layer on assumptions about what that includes (just like how people use the term virtualization but mean consolidation) to mean things that VDI does not imply. One of the most common things is to mean an additional management system for the VDI hosts. This is common and very useful but it is not part of VDI and not required in any way.
One way that this is handled is with RDS. Another is with XenDesktop. Small shops often do nothing. It's purely optional.
But since so many people just assume that every VDI deployment is going to have a "special" VDI management system, they start lumping that cost, overheard and licensing into VDI discussions without saying that they are, or why, and VDI turns from simple into confusing.
OOOOK I think you might have just hit the nail on the head!
I dig it!
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@Dashrender said:
Of course if you were using Citrix or Vmware's products, then you'd be paying for their remote access connection, but we're talking about MS's connection option. He's seeming to think something needs to be here, but doesn't know what.
Nope, that's not how that works either. This has nothing whatsoever to do with virtualization, it has to do with a misunderstanding of RDS. If you use XenApp in a case where XenApp is needed, RDS is needed to. You can't replace RDS with another technology, RDS licensing applies to use cases, not technologies.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
Of course if you were using Citrix or Vmware's products, then you'd be paying for their remote access connection, but we're talking about MS's connection option. He's seeming to think something needs to be here, but doesn't know what.
Nope, that's not how that works either. This has nothing whatsoever to do with virtualization, it has to do with a misunderstanding of RDS. If you use XenApp in a case where XenApp is needed, RDS is needed to. You can't replace RDS with another technology, RDS licensing applies to use cases, not technologies.
This I understand!
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@Dashrender said:
Of course we use RDC (which uses the RDP protocol) because it's built it, and you're assuming it's free - but Chris doesn't seem to think so.. and really at this point I have no idea if it is or not.
He never implies that. He definitely never says it. He only says that Hyper-V doesn't do it and that you'll have to decide how to do it.
That you don't have a super obvious answer that is free isn't pointed out to you, he pointed out that you have to make a choice. Like in my car example, you COULD choose to buy a new car, he wants to sell cars, so he leaves the option to do so open. He lets you imagine that he mentioned it for a reason - that you need a car. You don't. He mentioned it so that you would start picturing yourself in a new car.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
Of course we use RDC (which uses the RDP protocol) because it's built it, and you're assuming it's free - but Chris doesn't seem to think so.. and really at this point I have no idea if it is or not.
He never implies that. He definitely never says it. He only says that Hyper-V doesn't do it and that you'll have to decide how to do it.
That you don't have a super obvious answer that is free isn't pointed out to you, he pointed out that you have to make a choice. Like in my car example, you COULD choose to buy a new car, he wants to sell cars, so he leaves the option to do so open. He lets you imagine that he mentioned it for a reason - that you need a car. You don't. He mentioned it so that you would start picturing yourself in a new car.
I wonder if he is aware of the free option? Perhaps not? or he's just being completely coy when I'm asking.
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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.
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@Dashrender said:
I wonder if he is aware of the free option? Perhaps not? or he's just being completely coy when I'm asking.
He definitely knows. He also assumes that people looking at VDI are thinking VDI as all the marketers push it. Which involves all these bells and whistles that aren't actually part of VDI itself.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
I wonder if he is aware of the free option? Perhaps not? or he's just being completely coy when I'm asking.
He definitely knows. He also assumes that people looking at VDI are thinking VDI as all the marketers push it. Which involves all these bells and whistles that aren't actually part of VDI itself.
God damned sales people!
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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.
