Dedicated Windows VDI at AWS Likely Requires Changes

• Customers running the Windows desktop OS and Office on dedicated hardware in Amazon, Google, or Alibaba will face increasing license compliance challenges.
• Customers may have taken advantage of dedicated hosting to adopt hosted VDI, but Microsoft’s changes favor its own recent VDI offerings.
• The changes to the licensing for Windows and Office are less forgiving than the rule changes for Windows Server and SQL Server.

Licensing changes that Microsoft put in place in Oct. 2019 will soon affect all customers running Microsoft products on dedicated hosts at Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Alibaba. As customers adopt newer versions of affected products to remain supported, they are left with only two options: pay premium prices for compatible licenses at their current provider or migrate to Azure, which offers preferential licensing.

Dedicated Hosting Increasingly Favors Azure

In Oct. 2019, Microsoft made changes to the universal rules for how its products are licensed when used on dedicated hardware within AWS, GCP, and Alibaba, and any other service provider that relies on hosting on dedicated hardware within those cloud providers. In dedicated hosting, the entire hardware system (server) running in a cloud provider is dedicated to a single customer. This contrasts with multitenancy hosting, which is the predominant model used in hyperscale clouds today. In multitenancy, the server hardware is shared among customers, but in such a way that customers cannot access each other’s data.