Hosted Windows 10 Desktop Rules Eased

New Windows 10 licensing rules give customers more options for virtual desktop hosting by service providers, including Microsoft’s Azure, and could lower virtual desktop hosting costs. Organizations use virtual desktop hosting to quickly add or remove capacity, to shift desktop costs from capital to operating budgets, and for other reasons. The new rules will be welcome, but they only apply to the most recent versions of Windows 10 and have many other technical and procedural limitations.

Multitenant Hosting Allowed for Virtual Desktops

As of Aug. 2017, E3 or E5 levels of Windows Enterprise User Subscription License (SL) and Virtual Desktop Access (VDA) User SL provide customers the right to run and access Windows 10—based virtual desktops hosted on multitenant hardware at a service provider. The prior rules dictated that all hardware used to host virtual desktops running the Windows client OS had to be dedicated to a specific customer’s exclusive use.

Multitenant hosting enables service providers to set up new customers more quickly and achieve higher hardware utilization by sharing hardware across customers. That in turn could reduce the cost of hosting Windows desktops, and it enables hosting of Windows 10 virtual desktops on Azure.