Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Licensing Suites Available

Customers wanting to manage a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) with Microsoft management software can now purchase subscription-based suites. VDI allows users to access personalized desktops from any client and simplifies the provisioning, updating, and decommissioning of desktop environments. The suites license Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Services (RDS, formerly Terminal Services), which is built into Windows Server, and three System Center management products for use in a VDI. While customers can skip the suites—by licensing RDS and System Center separately or by licensing alternative third-party products—they may offer the lowest licensing costs and simplify licensing compliance for some customers.

In a VDI architecture, users’ desktops and applications run in virtual machines (VMs) hosted on servers in a data center rather than locally on users’ PCs. Each server hosts multiple VMs, each with its own instance of a Windows client OS (e.g., Windows XP, Windows Vista, or Windows 7), and each VM is accessed from a local device (typically a PC) by one user at a time. Hypervisor technology on each server isolates the VMs from one another, allowing them to share the server’s RAM, CPU, network card(s), and other resources without interfering with one another. Microsoft offers its hypervisor technology as part of Windows Server 2008 and 2008 R2, as well as a free product, Hyper-V Server; competing hypervisor offerings are available from vendors such as VMware.