Why Microsoft's VDI solution is not very useful

Wednesday, 26 August 2009 by Michel Roth

An interesting article by Brian Madden at searchVirtualDesktop.com on why the new Microsoft bundle makes sense but then again does not. icrosoft has traditionally not embraced the concept of VDI. For the longest time it was actually a technical violation of the Windows desktop license agreement to use Windows for VDI.

Then when Microsoft finally changed that policy, they did so by creating a license called "VECD" (for Vista Enterprise Centralized Desktop) which is a new license that's required in addition to your Vista Enterprise license.

Oh yeah, VECD is only available if you have Software Assurance. Ugh! And, even after VECD came out, Microsoft didn't have a VDI product of its own. VECD was created merely so you could use Windows with other vendors' VDI products.

So, it was kind of a surprise when Microsoft announced that they built rudimentary VDI support into Windows Server 2008 R2. This new VDI "product" was created by modifying the existing Terminal Server capabilities to also support VDI (since VDI is really nothing more than single-user Terminal Server) and leveraging virtual desktops running on Hyper-V R2.

But how would Microsoft sell this new capability? Would it be built-in to your Windows license? Of course not!

Source: http://searchvirtualdesktop.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid194_gci1365391,00.html?track=sy1220#