Licensing Windows for VDI

[July 20, 2015 note: A more recent version of this report, updated to reflect licensing changes, can be found at www.directionsonmicrosoft.com/licensing/secured/2015/07/licensing-windows-virtual-desktops.]

Organizations are implementing virtual desktop infrastructures (VDI) hoping that centralized management will reduce costs and increase data security and help address employees’ desire to use their own devices for work. Properly licensing a VDI requires the organization to correctly license its server infrastructure, Windows client OSs, and applications. This report only addresses licensing the Windows client OS for VDI. However, even licensing this one aspect of VDI can introduce license compliance issues that are difficult to mitigate completely.

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure

A computer’s desktop is composed of a combination of a client OS, such as Windows 7 or Windows 8 (Pro or Enterprise edition), as well as applications such as Microsoft Office and any line-of-business software a user needs. In a typical deployment scenario, a user’s desktop runs on a client device. In contrast, with VDI, a virtual desktop executes in its own Windows client OS-based virtual machine (VM) hosted on centralized servers in the organization’s data center. A user’s client device accesses the virtual desktop remotely, with user input and display output traversing the network between the virtual desktop in the VM and the client device.