Windows 365 - Coming 2nd August

[Katy]

Microsoft announced Windows 365 Cloud PC at Inspire today. In simple terms it's virtual desktop.

 

It will run along side Azure Virtual Desktop (previously called Windows Virtual Desktop, which, if you're not aware, in the most simple of analogies, is basically where you set up an RDS farm in Azure, but you can pick Windows 10 Multi-Session over Server as the OS) - AVD you have to set up all the infrastructure and you pay for your usage. Windows 365 Cloud PC you pay a fixed rate per user per month, depending on which SKU you pick - ranging from 1 vCPU to 8 vCPU. It's tightly integrated into MS Endpoint Manager (aka Intune) which is where you do all the setup and management.

 

Currently it needs to see an AD domain controller but they are working on removing this and making it Azure AD native. Once you've set that up, and your provisioning rules (which image to use for which groups), it's as simple as putting a new user into the correct group and turning on the licence to get their Cloud PC to create and spin up.

 

Probably going to get more use in the enterprise rather than schools but it makes BYOD a game changer especially if we get some good Edu pricing - use the Remote Desktop app on whatever the device is to access your own Windows 10 desktop, without having to look after Remote Desktop Services hosts.

 

Pricing currently undisclosed (even in NDA land) but I'd expect to see it soon, given this goes general availability on 2nd August.

 

 

More details at: Windows 365 Remote Desktop, Cloud PC | Microsoft

Also the MS blog post: Introducing a new era of hybrid personal computing: the Windows 365 Cloud PC | Microsoft 365 Blog

Video:

[Primus]

Sounds really interesting Katy, I assume you'll be doing a blog showing us all how to administrate it?

[Roberto]

I think it's a fantastic opportunity in business where companies might currently have a huge investment in on-prem terminal services or Citrix.

 

It should also be a good thing for education if the price is right. Think about the pain of having to spin up special environments for exams? Just use this instead. Working in an environment where all the talk is BYOD but you're worried about licences or a standardised environment to run, e.g. Photoshop? Here you go. Staff or students needing to work from home because lockdown again and your current campus IP over Potato connection won't take it? Hello!

[Katy]

Sounds really interesting Katy, I assume you'll be doing a blog showing us all how to administrate it?

Haha yes it's on my list to have a look at if/when they dish out some MVP licences for it.

 

It should also be a good thing for education if the price is right. Think about the pain of having to spin up special environments for exams? Just use this instead. Working in an environment where all the talk is BYOD but you're worried about licences or a standardised environment to run, e.g. Photoshop? Here you go. Staff or students needing to work from home because lockdown again and your current campus IP over Potato connection won't take it? Hello!

Definitely - although could argue some of these would be better suited to Azure Virtual Desktop. But that there's two choices now is brilliant. AVD for the "you need this for $RandomAmountOfTime so we'll pay the usage charge" vs "you need this all the time, so we'll pay the fixed per user per month price for Cloud PC"

[Arthur]

Pricing currently undisclosed (even in NDA land) but I'd expect to see it soon, given this goes general availability on 2nd August.

Microsoft leaked the price of one of the non-Edu plans.

 

https://twitter.com/tomwarren/status/1415375207091539968

 

It looks like a Windows 365 Cloud PC will cost $31 per month for the 2 CPU / 4GB of RAM / 128GB of storage option. Microsoft accidentally showed this pricing during an Inspire session today

Edited July 15, 2021 by Arthur

[Davit2005]

We setup WVD at beginning of lockdown. Some of our research and study applications that the students use are like 100GB plus so cannot really expect students to download these then the licensing considerations on top.

 

At a previous place I was involved in the Citrix rollout, we had some thin clients on site, virtual apps and desktops accessed by external users but the cost and maintenance was not cheap then the looking after as well (Provisioning servers, Application servers, load balancers, the factored in redundancy then the underlying hypervisors to support the virtual desktops and those servers). I can totally see the benefit of cloud virtual depending on your business requirements. We did not really have any call for any special apps apart from MIS systems access etc on the Citrix virtual desktops, mostly just gave access to remote users and the 50 or so thin clients on site at that time.

[flyinghaggis]

It could be useful but my first two thoughts are that :-

 

A) It sounds likely to be pretty expensive. Hopefully the Edu costs are super low to entice schools though from what I've heard that's not been the case with Azure/etc so I suspect it may not be cost effective for widepsread use in education.

 

B) We, and I'm sure most other schools, are increasingly moving towards running everything in a web browser (Office 365, Google Apps, MIS, etc) so I'm not sure building a dependency on running Windows apps inside a cloud hosted version of Windows is an appropriate solution for anything other than older legacy software.

 

It's a nice option to have though.

Edited July 15, 2021 by flyinghaggis

[Arthur]

[FN-GM]

I fail to see why this would be desirable for widescale use. VDI is pretty old hat and yesterday technology. In the days of a work force needing to be more mobile they are likely to need a laptop that is "full fat". Considering more and more software is cloud based they can run natively on other devices such as iPads.

[paulkerton]

The costs are absolutely ridiculous. £420 a year for 2 vCPUs/8GB RAM/128GB

 

I can buy a Ryzen 3 laptop for that, and it'll last several years. What a non-product.

[aicrd]

The costs are absolutely ridiculous. £420 a year for 2 vCPUs/8GB RAM/128GB

 

I can buy a Ryzen 3 laptop for that, and it'll last several years. What a non-product.

 

It's cheaper than other offerings though. Amazon WorkSpaces charge about the same per month for that config, however they also charge hourly rates to use the service, making it more expensive. WorkSpaces seems to have thrived, so a market does exist for this. Calling it a non-product would perhaps be a bit unfair.

 

And also, this is for remote access to company resources as well. Not just a "PC in the cloud". Thats what we are planning to use it for. Remote access to network shares and company owned software.

Edited August 4, 2021 by aicrd

[paulkerton]

Calling it a non-product would perhaps be a bit unfair.

In Enterprise perhaps not, but in a UK Education market that's terrified of moving away from SIMS (still 70% market share) its really a non-starter. Especially with some of the Business Managers I've worked with in the past, who'll buy poorer equipment multiple times and end up with it costing more than the more expensive stuff over the same timeframe, if it *looks* cheaper on the books.