Unidesk's Virtual Desktop Management Blog

Update: Microsoft Desktop Virtualization Licensing changes – VECD no more, here’s VDA.

As of July 1, 2010, Microsoft has eliminated the VECD license, eliminated the need to purchase an additional license for Windows clients with Software Assurance (SA), and introduced Virtual Desktop Access (VDA) licensing.   

Who does this effect?

Anyone accessing server-hosted virtual desktops with a Windows OS.  Generally, you do not license the copies of the Windows OS that live on the server, you license the end points/access points that access these copies. The access point subscription licenses can be boiled down to this:

• VDA is a subscription license that is for access points that do not have a qualifying copy, or any copy, of Windows. (Aka, a thin terminal.)

• SA is also a subscription license that enables access to hosted desktops, but it includes a license for the Windows OS for the end point. (For example, you use a Win7 laptop to access the virtual machine.)

How is this different than VECD?
If you are a Windows client Software Assurance (SA) customer, you no longer need to buy VECD to access your virtual desktops, it is now included.   (This saves $23 a year.)

If you want to use a device without SA to access a virtual desktop, you need to purchase VDA - a $100 annual subscription. This is quite similar to VECD, but it is $10 a year less, and they have lifted some of the restrictions on access. You can now access desktops from devices both inside and outside the firewall.

So how does this map to the use cases? Lets try it out:

Use Case 1: Enterprise buys a new PC or laptop that comes with an OEM copy of Windows.

VDI License Implications: This OEM Windows license is based on the physical machine you purchased, and is not transferrable to the hosted virtual desktop, which has a separate copy of Windows running on a server. So, you have two choices if you want this new PC to be an access point for VDI:

    * Bring the new PC (*note must be less than 90 days from purchase) under Software Assurance.  Bringing it under Software Assurance will cost roughly $50 per year.
    * Purchase a VDA license at an annual subscription cost of $100 per year.


 
Use Case 2: Enterprise wishes to re-purpose an old PC or laptop into a “dumbed-down thin client” that can serve as a VDI access point.

VDI License Implications: If the PC is eligible for SA (meaning it was already covered by SA), you can choose to maintain the annual SA subscription ($50 per year).

If the old PC or laptop is not eligible for SA, you'll need to purchase the VDA license at a subscription cost of $100 per year.


Use Case 3: Enterprise purchases a new thin client to use as a VDI access point.

VDI License Implications: By definition, a machine that does not have a Windows license or run Windows cannot be added to SA, so this use case will require the VDA license at a subscription cost of $100 per year.

Use Case 4: Bring Your Own PC (BYOPC).

VDI License Implications: Consultants or employees who buy their own PCs have a home license for Windows. Since the license does not belong to corporate, it is not eligible for SA. Enterprises must purchase a VDA license for each PC at a cost of $100 per year.

Use Case 5: Employees use a work PC to access their hosted virtual desktops at work, and occasionally use their home PC to access their virtual desktop to work from home.

VDI License Implications: The work PC will need to be licensed as mentioned above. If the primary user of the machine is the person that works at home, then the SA license covers occasional home use.

Use Case 6: Enterprise supplies a thin terminal to access VDI at work, and a laptop for travel.

VDI License Implications: This use case is interesting – you need VDA for the thin terminal, $100 per year, but you may not need any licensing for the laptop, the new VDA license includes the right for the primary user to access corporate VDI desktops from non-corporate PCs, such as internet cafes and home PCs.



For full details, visit http://www.microsoft.com/windows/enterprise/solutions/virtualization/operating-system/


The good news here is that Unidesk will not do anything to increase your VDA fees. Just be sure to design in your access point license planning well ahead of implementation.


Did I miss something? Let me know!


Nicole Reineke
Director, Product Management

VDI and Unidesk Hot Topics at Wisconsin VMware Users Group

Unidesk sponsored last week's Wisconsin VMware Users Group meeting in Madison, with Ron Oglesby presenting "Implementing VMware View and VDI - Strategies for Success." Over 100 people attended, indicating the strong interest in desktop virtualization, and the need for help when implementing a VDI access solution such as View.

Ron's discussion of the user adoption, management, and storage challenges struck a chord with the 10% who said they had already implemented VDI, the 40% who are currently in pilot, and the rest who are thinking about it.

Here are a few of the tweets:

@timcurless Really great and entertaining VDI preso from @RonOglesby! Very applicable to what we're doing. Thanks Ron and @wivmug

@EricSelje I will sit through just about anything to win an iPad, but that was *great* content yesterday. I learned a ton.

@banksz This last one probably would have come in handy as we are considering attempting to implement View

@nelmedia Another great WI VMUG yesterday. Great to see you again Ron & thx to @Unidesk for the iPad giveaway.

Here's Ron presenting, nice of Promega Corp to let us use their state of the art facility.

Congratulations to Nathan Scheunnaman of Wonderbox who was the lucky winner of our iPad give away.

Big thanks to Rod Gabriel (@ThatFridgeGuy), WI-VMUG leader, for inviting us and for his feedback on Ron's session: "Overall, among the best overall quality of all presentations. I got a lot of very good feedback from attendees. I'd be happy to work with you again and would recommend you to any other VMUG looking for sponsors that provide quality content."

And thanks to all who attended, especially those who have already downloaded Unidesk and are starting to pilot us with VMware View!

-Tom Rose
Unidesk Chief Marketing Officer

Why Is Local Disk Being Ignored In VDI Deployments?

Over the past 6 months I have come to the conclusion we're ignoring an obvious way to drive down VDI costs - use local disk. I have brought this up a few times on Twitter and have seen a mixed response. Violent dissent from one part of my followers and violent agreement from others. Yesterday's debate on brianmadden.com is a good example.

One response pointed me to Dan Feller’s entries on the Citrix blog - Deciding on local or shared storage for your desktop virtualization solution and Local Storage or Shared Storage, That is the Question.

In both, Dan talks about using local storage to reduce the price point of VDI, but at the cost of losing some of the features we are used to, such as load balancing, live migrations of VMs, etc. This is what I would like to take a bit farther. Do you NEED those features for your desktops?

Recently at BriForum I posed the following questions to those who attended my session “Server Virtualization: Success, VDI: Not so much. Why?”:

• How many of you boot your normal desktops from the SAN?
• How many of you boot your terminal servers from the SAN?
• How many of you have an extremely short SLA on recovering your desktops?

Very few hands went up for the last question. None were up for the first two. I used this to frame a discussion around using local disk for virtual desktops hosted in the data center. Most of today’s VDI environments are using centralized storage simply because that is how the server virtualization platform was designed.

But if we stop and think about the actual requirements of the desktops being hosted - the required uptime, SLAs, RPOs and RTOs - we'd realize we may not need SAN for VDI.

Too often centralized storage is just assumed.  And once it gets momentum, it's never changed.  And then the project manger or VP of IT or CFO decides that VDI is expensive and that the storage cost is the reason. What to do, what to do!

Most people never get back to thinking about local storage for virtual desktops even though there are terminal servers hosting remote desktops in the next rack over. Why is this? Because we've bought into the idea that they REQUIRE Vmotion, or fast recovery with tools like VMware’s HA. But do you really NEED that for the desktop? If you lose a host server (a fairly rare occasion, thankfully) how soon do these desktops have to be back up?

What do you do now in Terminal Server environments? When the user gets disconnected, they click the icon again and they're routed to another desktop on another host. Why is this good enough for terminal services but not for VDI?

Local disk is ignored for a few simple reasons:

1. Storage companies make a lot of money selling centralized disk and the software around it so they're pushing it for VDI
2. The hypervisor’s “big” features require centralized storage
3. Storage reduction and image management approaches like Linked Clones and Provisioning Server don’t work well (if at all) without centralized storage.

But with the price of SAN (which is the biggest knock on VDI), we should at least be bringing up the local storage topic in the discussion.

*Shameless, somewhat on topic, plug here: Unidesk works with local or centralized storage. Our disk savings and single image management features are not based on centralized storage volumes. So you can use whatever fits your needs if you are using Unidesk. I just happen to be a big fan of local disk, specifically local SSD.

Is local storage a panacea for VDI? Maybe not. But you can get the capacity and IOPS you need at a much lower cost, and probably even enter into high performance disk (like SSDs) for a much lower cost per desktop than you could with that array you're getting quotes for.

And, yes, you may need HA to recover your servers but do you HAVE TO HAVE IT for all your desktops? If your cost per VM for storage is $450 per desktop centralized and $29 per desktop when using local storage, is that enough to make local storage more attractive? Are you willing to sacrifice HA for that low of a cost?

I believe that local storage should be one of your considerations for your VDI environment. See if it fits and if you can get it to meet your true desktop requirements. Then give us a call. We’ll make it work.

-Ron Oglesby

Unidesk 1.0 Launches, Unleashes Full Power of Desktop Virtualization

Unidesk® 1.0 has launched! Desktop virtualization will never be the same.

Press Releases

• Unidesk 1.0 Management Platform Launches, Unleashes Full Power of Desktop Virtualization
• Virtual Desktop Management Accelerates as Unidesk Signs Customers and Channel Partners
• Pano Logic, Unidesk Collaborate on Low Cost Desktop Virtualization with 100% Personalization
• Combined Solution From Leostream and Unidesk to Simplify Management of Large Desktop Virtualization Deployment

Customers and Partners Participate - See What They're Saying

Unidesk Customers:

Unidesk Solution Partners:

Unidesk Alliance Partners:

Briforum 2010: desktop virtualization expertise and hands-on VDI experience

On the lower level of the Hilton Chicago Hotel, hundreds of technical specialists, who manage more than 3,000,000 desktops combined, congregated to learn the latest and greatest information on technology breakthroughs in the application delivery and desktop virtualization industry.

From the outset it was an energetic show. As we reported in our last blog, attendees were at our booth starting at 7:30 in the morning and stayed until late in the evening to get demonstrations of Unidesk’s technology. The conversations started technical, and went even deeper. As one attendee commented –

I’m at BriForum because I don’t want to hear the “marketing messages”, I want to experience the product and walk through the architecture myself.

And we were thrilled to oblige.

There was an amazing variety of organizations converging to find a solution for their desktops. Technical specialists from hospitals, universities, construction management firms, and law offices were at our booth learning how we could help make VDI more successful. Across this disparate group, the message was loud and clear – they need their end users to love their virtual desktops as much as they love their current PCs. Many had tried other technologies to no avail - only a real desktop experience would do for their users. They need this at a reasonable cost, without a ton of storage, and in a manageable way. And they saw that this is exactly what Unidesk delivers.

Thanks to all of the attendees at Briforum who made this such a great week; I can't wait to participate again next year. Congratulations to Vieve Veith from Blessings Hospital who won our iPad drawing!!

Nicole Reineke
Director of Product Management

Oh, and Brian, our VP of Sales, loved the food! http://tweetphoto.com/27672126

Keeping our promise: see Unidesk at Briforum

Last year, I attended my first Briforum and blogged about the experience. I closed by saying I couldn't wait until Briforum 2010, when we would return as a sponsor and demo how Unidesk transforms VDI with clear ROI and greater user acceptance. As you can see below, we kept our promise!

Feedback from the team is that we're getting the usual big crowds around our booth (#201). All want to see demos of how our desktop layering technology improves the VDI user experience by sustaining all user personalization (yes, even user-installed applications), makes O/S and application updates effortless, and shrinks storage use.

Also at the event, our very own Ron Oglesby will discuss the issues that need to be addressed to unlock widespread virtual desktop adoption in his breakout session “Server Virtualization – Success! VDI – Not so Much. Why VDI Adoption Has Been Slow and How Desktop Virtualization Will Change the Future.” If you're at the event and don't plan to stay out late at a Chicago jazz club (or somewhere else), check him out Thursday morning at 8:30am CT.

We'll also be giving away another iPad, so stay tuned! We'll be announcing the winner right here on our blog.

-Tom Rose
Unidesk CMO

If virtual desktop (VDI) profile management makes you crazy, call Unidesk... we’ll eliminate it

I spent yesterday at an enjoyable partner meeting where one of the main architects clearly expressed his distaste for several brands of profile management software. His customers’ top complaints?

• Profiles are extra work to manage on top of their virtual desktops
• Users don’t like the limitations of their ‘profiles’; they want a real desktop
• One product has random profile disappearance with major OS upgrades
• With other products, the end users feel like their desktops aren’t ‘ready’ for them when they log in.

I’ve had this conversation with quite a few customers, and sometimes its hard to get people to pinpoint exactly what irks them about traditional profile management software. But not this guy. There was clear disdain on his face when he talked about the challenges he faced.

So, knowing what the core issue they wanted to investigate was, I used my aircard, showing one bar, in the center cave of a brick building and provided a live demo of what Unidesk 100% personalization is, what it means, how it works. Why users love it, and why IT loves it.

I showed him how users can install applications, add-ins on top of IT-delivered apps (like that WebEx control that you always say "yes" to), and made changes to the file system. And then I created data, changed settings, and acted like a typical end user. Using the Unidesk Management Console, I then upgraded the operating system with a service pack and dozens of security fixes, added 3 applications, including a fully configured printer, AV software, and virtualized application, and repaired Office. And all of the user changes persisted.

And he smiled.

So, if profiles are getting you down, take a look at our demo, and you’ll see what it really means to have 100% personalization, without the management overhead. Register for a live demo, or view a previously recorded demo right here…

Nicole Reineke, Director of Product Management
Twitter: @NicoleReineke

VDI, XenClient, iPad, and more final thoughts from Citrix Synergy

Since I already summarized booth visitor reactions to the Unidesk demos last week, I'll just share a few observations from our last few days at Synergy before unveiling the winner of our iPad contest:

• Expect to see VDI implemented in mixed environments. Many customers told us they're planning to implement Citrix XenDesktop on top of VMware vSphere.
• VDI is still in its infancy. Several of the largest and most progressive enterprises are reporting the same thing - VDI pilots are in progress but large-scale deployments are not yet underway yet because of an inability to give knowledge workers a great user experience at reasonable cost (hence the interest in Unidesk).
• Unidesk Chief Solution Architect Ron Oglesby is a hit with the virtualization community. His breakout session "Server Virtualization – smashing success, Desktop Virtualization - on hold. Why?" was packed and covered in a blog by Sid Herron of Citrix and Microsoft partner Moose Logic. I lost count of how many times people came up to him at our booth saying "I've read your books." Good thing he's humble.
• XenClient is very cool, but practical applications of the bare-metal hypervisor are scarce.
• The real XenClient opportunity is not about letting users toggle back and forth between work and home VMs in a Bring Your Own PC (BYOPC) model. XenClient's ability to run multiple VMs on a PC or notebook opens up amazing new opportunities for third party solutions that can improve or provide new capabilities around desktop patching, app delivery, user mobility, personalization, end user self-service, desktop repair, auditing, edge security, data protection, and more.
• With the integration of XenDesktop and XenApp and Citrix FlexCast's blurring the lines between terminal services and VDI, you have to be very clear when explaining how you work with Citrix. Even though our signs said we're focused on VDI (for now), we still had a lot of people asking if Unidesk supports terminal services.
• We were impressed at how technical and eager to learn the Synergy attendees were. We were still giving demos to a good-sized crowd as the union workers were literally taking our booth apart around us.

As for the iPad... The people who entered our contest were a mix of customers and solution partners who need Unidesk to reduce storage requirements, improve the user experience, and simplify patching/provisioning for their VDI projects. The winner was the virtualisation product manager for a large UK reseller specializing in Citrix and VMware (and now Unidesk) solutions. That's her accepting the Unidesk iPad from yours truly.

She was thrilled to win, especially since she had been looking all over San Fran for one to bring home, and they were sold out. We were thrilled to hear one of her clients will become one of Unidesk's first customers.

10 more lucky winners of Unidesk Starter Packs will receive details about their prize via email.

If you missed us at Synergy, fear not, you have two more chances to win an iPad and Unidesk Starter Packs. Look for us at the Kansas City VMware User Group (VMUG) June 11 or at Briforum in Chicago June 15-17.

-Tom Rose
Unidesk CMO

Synergy Day 2 recap and booth visitor reactions to Unidesk

For the second straight day, our booth at Citrix Synergy was packed. From what we could tell, we were the busiest small vendor in the Solution Expo - people often stacked three and four deep.

The customers, Citrix partners, and consultants above wanted to see the Unidesk demo and learn about our desktop layering technology for the same reasons:

• They are starting VDI projects or are in the early stages of their VDI implementations with XenDesktop
  
• Their end users are demanding the equivalent of a traditional PC experience, in which they can install their own applications and make other rich desktop customizations.
  
• These changes can't be lost when IT updates Windows every two weeks with the latest patches, hot fixes, and service packs.
• IT can't afford to allocate full disk images for every user on more expensive data center-class storage

Some of the quotes from our booth vistors:

"Our CEO runs our company like a family.  He wants to keep that cozy feeling, and let users do whatever they want on their desktops.  We can't afford the storage for this.  And since we can't control what these monkeys do, we need to be able to back out their changes when they break their desktops. Unidesk looks like the perfect solution."

"Unidesk is the s***. You're too good to be true. Too simple. We're going to be your biggest partner in Europe."

"I woke up thinking about Unidesk and what I saw last night. I have a few more questions about how your layering works. Show me again how you can reduce VDI storage costs while still giving every user their own personalization layer."

"User-installed apps are just part of our problem. There are a bunch of other challenges we have with users that Linked Clones and Provisioning Server can't maintain through Windows updates. Especially around security and authentication. You appear to solve these problems, too."

"Everybody talks about the iPhone as being so cool. But it's really a consumer play. You've taken Apple's usability and applied it to a real business application. Unidesk is like desktop management meets the iPhone."

More updates to come.

-Tom Rose
Unidesk CMO

Citrix Ready, user-installed apps, VDI storage savings and more at Synergy

We kicked off a busy week at Citrix Synergy in San Francisco today with two announcements.

First, Unidesk virtual desktop management software is now verified as Citrix Ready for use with Citrix XenDesktop. We've passed the Citrix validation tests, and have shown we can provision 100% personal VDI desktops that give XenDesktop users the same or better user experience than they had with their traditional PCs.

This includes the ability to sustain user-installed apps through patches and updates to Microsoft Windows - without having to create full virtual desktops for every user.  It's made possible with our desktop layering technology, which enables Windows and common apps to be shared across many VDI desktops.

Maximum storage savings for lower XenDesktop TCO. Maximum personalization to broaden XenDesktop's use cases.

Our other announcement is what we're doing at Synergy. Unidesk Chief Solution Architect is presenting the breakout session “Server Virtualization – smashing success, Desktop Virtualization - on hold. Why?” on Wednesday, May 12 at 3:30pm PST. Don't miss it!

But if you do, we're showcasing our 100% personal Citrix XenDesktop user experience live on the Solution Expo Hall in Booth #538. Here's a pre-show look at the booth.

Hope to see you at the event!

-Tom Rose
Unidesk Chief Marketing Officer