Microsoft To Bring Multi-User Virtualization To Windows, Office With Windows Virtual Desktop Service (zdnet.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: On Sept. 24, Microsoft announced what it's calling the Windows Virtual Desktop (WMD). WVD will allow users to virtualize Windows 7 and 10, Office 365 ProPlus apps and other third-party applications by running them remotely in Azure virtual machines. Using WMD, customers will be able to provide remote desktop sessions with multiple users logged into the same Windows 10 or Windows Server virtual machine. They also can opt to virtualize the full desktop or individual Microsoft Store and/or line-of-business applications. The WMD service also supports full VDI with Windows 10 and Windows 7, Microsoft officials told Ars Technica. (Those wanting to virtualize Windows 7 after Microsoft support ends in January 2020 will be able to do so for three years without paying for Extended Security Updates.)

Licenses for WVD will be provided for no additional cost as part of Windows Enterprise and Education E3 and E5 subscriptions. The aforementioned Windows 10 Enterprise for Virtual Desktops edition won't be released as a separate version of Windows 10 at all. That name is just for licensing purposes, officials said. Microsoft officials said a public preview of WVD will be available later this year, and those interested can request notification of the preview's availability. To use WVD, users need an Azure subscription and will be charged for the storage and compute their virtual machines use. Microsoft also plans to offer WVD via Microsoft Cloud Solution Providers and is working with third parties like Citrix to build on top of WVD, officials said.

Comments

Much as I hate Microsoft

[GerryGilmore]

Calling their new product Weapons of Mass Destruction is just going too darned far!!

Re:Much as I hate Microsoft

[msauve]

But give them points for honesty.

Re: Much as I hate Microsoft

[datavirtue]

Windows VD. Get it?

Re:Much as I hate Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

Came for this.

Re: Much as I hate Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

No thanks. You can keep it

Re:Much as I hate Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

I want Weapons of Mass Cocksuction.

Re: Much as I hate Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

Is that a venereal disease?

Re: Much as I hate Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

I haven't got it, but for most it is STD.

Re:Much as I hate Microsoft

[ole_timer]

either way - wmd or windows vd - it's bad!

Personal Computing is dead

[110010001000]

This is pretty much the end goal of corporations. They want to turn the PC to a remote desktop on in cloud that you need to pay for each month. In addition it provides perfect DRM and control over the user. The PC era was great, but it couldn't last once the MBA's moved in.

Re: Personal Computing is dead

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want to actually own your computer, you can still use Linux or BSD. Even Mac is still relatively free of being tied to the mothership, at least for now.

Re: Personal Computing is dead

[110010001000]

Yes, but the NEXT step is that your ISP will only allow you to use one of the cloud services for your desktop. If you don't think that will happen, you haven't been paying attention.

Re:Personal Computing is dead

[msauve]

Next, they'll come up with a way of running batch jobs, instead of 3270 sessions to the mainframe^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h cloud.

Re: Personal Computing is dead

[NicknameUnavailable]

There's two sides to this:

• Corporations want to spy on you to sell your data for increased revenue.
• Automation is not properly priced into the economy and it's genuinely causing havok.

That second one is the real issue, because if you automate 1,000 jobs with a program (Excel alone takes care of about a dozen at every mid sized company to achieve the same efficiency they would without it) then the person who wrote the program gets paid likely hourly or salary, the company that wrote it gets an initial contract (for custom work) or if they are really lucky and can make it generic enough they get a much smaller sale every few years adding up to more than a single custom contract. Neither case really makes up the economic impact (e.g. you lost 1,000 minimum wage jobs for a 100k contract and the net on the economy is about -$14,440,000/year - -$14,340,000 the first year for the pissant contractor who "got" the work.)

This is a major issue, as we've experienced compounding automation in computers of this form since the 80's - absolutely wrecking the economy in the process (most of this gets covered up in the compounding inflation rate of ~2.5%/year, but if you adjust the average take-home back then with today you'll see a major decline.)

Software corporations have every reason to stop this from their standpoint (an operating system can only do so much before it's effectively "done" and you can't get people to buy new versions of it - at which point your entire industry collapses without a subscription model,) but more importantly, we're heading toward a world where most of the jobs are automated and the only ones benefiting from it are the guys who got a chair (pun intended) when the music stopped.

For the sake of the economy as a whole we need to seriously consider taxes on automation which feed back into a UBI program (at the very least) equal to a sizable percentage of the savings, back-dated to when the automation started. It's too late to simply say "if you automate a position pay 50% of those wages into a pool for UBI, every year just like you would have paid the wages before the automation" because we're long beyond the point where that would be an equitable amount to cover basic needs, and going much beyond 50% would discourage further automation (which if done right, does actually benefit everyone - this isn't meant to be some Luddite dribble post.)

TL;DR: tax automation (including what is already in place) at a mere half of the displaced wages and we'll have the same exact fully-functional infrastructure of the modern world and enough UBI that everyone can own a home without debt - it's that fucking extreme of an issue.

Re: Personal Computing is dead

[Anonymous Coward]

AWS and VMware willl have to shave their fees/license costs, or lodge a monopoly suit if cross license fees are too much. This goes back to IBM bundling days.

Never mind the security of MS's VM has not been tested in light of Spectre/Meltdown/TLB, and the NEW license could have bizarre Facebook like antiprivacy clauses changeable at any time.

Linux still works though.

Re: Personal Computing is dead

[Anonymous Coward]

Well I guess all the elevator operators lost their jobs when self-service buttons were installed. But the world marched on and all the unemployed elevator operators had to find work in other sectors. Computers have automated tasks since they were first introduced. If you worked a job prior to the introduction of PC you would recognize all the jobs that became obsolete.

And how would you go about setting tax rates for automation? You would have some type of mechanism that requires companies to report what they have automated. And a UBI sounds good on paper but it will never work in the US. People working for a living are paying taxes into the system. Someone being handed a paycheck each month for not working are not contributing into the system. A UBI will end up creating a prole class living on the dole and be looked down on by all those actually working for a living. And we see the first working warp drive before the US government could ever create something resembling a UBI system. The government are incompetent meatheads who refuse to do their jobs. If they worked as hard doing their jobs as they do getting their jobs things might be different.

Re: Personal Computing is dead

[Zaelath]

Yeah, bullshit. Are you suggesting that ISPs, who are competitive and have no skin in this particular game, are going to cut off all the set-top boxes and smart TVs or they can somehow differentiate between network devices behind a router? Even if they could, what is their motivation?

Re: Personal Computing is dead

[NicknameUnavailable]

I suggested it was the sensible solution to the issue, not that there's a way from here to there. The only real solution any of us can take part in is to stock up on guns, ammo, and food that isn't perishable for when the thing collapses.

Re: Personal Computing is dead

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, right up till they decide to properly lock down the bios to "protect the user from viruses/hackers/whatever".
PC will only run the "verified" OS that came with said machine - no ifs, no buts, no settings to play with, if the signature doesn't match it doesn't run.
Label those who try to bypass this "protection" as nefarious criminal hacker types (like rom modders).
Criminalise the sharing of information that might help people bypass the "protection" (like that tractor company).
Finally, block net access to devices running "unverified" software.

Re: Personal Computing is dead

[NicknameUnavailable]

Your memes are stale. The economy is already horribly inefficient that if it crashed and started over with barter day 1 of the restart would have 90%+ less waste.

Re: Personal Computing is dead

[Anonymous Coward]

Long-winded idiot alert. I refer you to the article about Millennials falling for scams...

Re: Personal Computing is dead

[Anonymous Coward]

automation workz if there is a end-goal.
if you automate (out) the human then someday there will be no humans left with income to buy your auto-made products.
again, automation is not bad IF there is a overall goal that puts human well being and happyness first.

Re: Personal Computing is dead

[NicknameUnavailable]

Never suggested automation wasn't good.

Re: Personal Computing is dead

[Anonymous Coward]

Automation causes 4 seperate issues.

First, workers have to work much smarter and much harder to compete. Intelligence is largely gained as an inheritence and something you get as practice when you are young so if you go through a public school you are unlikely to be very intelligent. Its also gained by investing time in gaining knowledge which can take years or decades. Ultimately, this produces systemic risks for workers where their skill may become less valuable or desirable.

Second, as automation produces more stuff, the reason to work smarter and harder for those maintaining the automation become fewer and fewer. Maslov's heirarchy of needs lays this out nicely.

Third, Wealth distribution is largely done today as a consequence of leverage. I once saved an employer 100's of thousands of dollars and my reward for that was a buck an hour raise. Literally, the only way to get paid more is to find a way to legally force management to pay you more. Automation has also made it much easier to subjugate labor. 20 years ago, everyone sending their paychecks to ADP would've been unthinkable. Today companies can pay ADP to do a "background check" and see how much you have made\make. This affects economic demand tremendously because people have less money to spend.

Fourth, The way we're managing that right now is by allowing banks to run texas ratios that are astronomical, literally nobody is solvent by any reasonable definition of solvency.

The fix here is not UBI; you're going to create a total catastrophe. You will literally have a drug epidemic and a pandemic of listlessness and depression. The fix here is, very simply, to require health insurance as part of any employment over 8hrs a week, and overtime is now any work over 32 hours, then you up minimum wage to $15 an hour and index to inflation. You cap executive salaries at half a million a year, and then require any public company have a charter that lays out employee stock with direct profit sharing per shared owned and the split and distribution of employee compensation via stock. This stops the robber-barrons from becoming monarchs, and you force organizations that don't automate out of the market, and the ones that do, must now pay their staff better. Finally, you create a class of labor imports which are things like foreign call centers or foreign technical support, and levy tarrifs on them. You increase taxes and put the money into a space and energy programs, and begin providing substantial tax breaks and incentives to companies doing R&D work, and that is not a few billion a year, but $100's of billions a year. All of that will keep everyone well employed and motivated for several generations to come and you will have a PC-Level, IPhone-Level revolution 3-4 times a decade. Finally, you place anyone who is unemployed on a very basic subsistence assistance program, and require they register with the government as available for work, and provide that registeration to any company looking to hire. They can refuse to work a few times at a company, but over a specific limit, and benefits are cut.

Re:Personal Computing is dead

[JustNiz]

Replace the name PC with "dumb terminal", the name "cloud" with mainframe, and the the billable period of month with "CPU second" and you have exactly the IBM paradigm that got Microsoft their start by providing a far saner desktop-local alternative to.

Re: Personal Computing is dead

[The123king]

*I think you'll find that the NeXTstep is the foundation of Mac OS X/macOS

Re: Personal Computing is dead

[mangastudent]

The issue, as I understand it, with your thesis is that economists haven't been able to find productivity gains from the widespread adoption of software like Excel. You ought to see more economic activity per person, but ... who knows, maybe Parkinson's law is in play, ""work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion", maybe we programmers are to blame for the vast expansion of government intrusion in the economy because our tools like Excel have allowed companies to cope without bankrupting (more of) them, maybe the economists' metrics are somehow wrong.

Re:Personal Computing is dead

[modmans2ndcoming]

Centralizing desktop functions for an enterprise is about saving tens of millions in hardware costs. If staff can interact using a centralized virtual desktop they can walk up to any terminal and there work is sitting there, exactly how they left it when they went to lunch. The flexibility and reliability that brings to a business is ridiculously valuable.

PCs were used as endpoints because servers were not powerful enough for the scale of operations that were happening at businesses, or, the business was so small that it could not afford a server infrastructure. Now, all of that is gone. Servers can serve up the end point experience for workers anywhere around the planet. It's one of the few times a change in business practice has happened because of the technical superiority as opposed to some stupid trend.

Re:Personal Computing is dead

[modmans2ndcoming]

It was sane for the time because the compute power of a mainframe and the flexibility of tasks a mainframe could perform for a company was limited. That is no longer the case. Equating a full GUI desktop experience to a timeshare text terminal experience doesn't make sense.

Re:Personal Computing is dead

[mangastudent]

I'd bet another factor is that ubiquitous 1000BT Ethernet links over cheap enough Cat 5e cables are fast enough to make this setup work well enough.

Re: Personal Computing is dead

[comodoro]

This is strange, how did this post get so big score? Yet it suggests that getting efficient means loss for the economy. I am in no way libertarian nor neoconservative, but it looks to me like Smith's candlemakers again.

Re:Personal Computing is dead

[JustNiz]

It makes far more sense than renting desktop time in the cloud, and willingly becoming victim to every risk that being totally dependent on a shady company like Microsoft brings with it.

Re:Personal Computing is dead

[JustNiz]

What makes you think there will be any real cost saving or even hardware difference between a low-end desktop PC and a "terminal" that is in reality still basically a PC, plus a per-user monthly fee?

Re:Personal Computing is dead

[Rick Schumann]

I was thinking the same thing but in slightly different terms: Microsoft wants to create the era of "Mainframe 2p0", and go back to the 70's and 80's, where all you had was a dumb terminal and connected remotely to the actual computer.

For what it's worth, I don't see how powerful desktop computing is going to go away. Hardware is too cheap, and you do not have to run Windows, you can run Linux. As much as I think Microsoft would like to prevent anything but Windows from being directly bootable on your own computer, there will always be a movement to do an end-run around those sorts of efforts, to the extent of BIOS hacking, and perhaps even open-source motherboards. "OS as a service" is as much bullshit as "Software as a service" is, and there will always be a crowd of people who will say "Hell, no!" to it.

Re: Personal Computing is dead

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but the NEXT step is that your ISP will only allow you to use one of the cloud services for your desktop. If you don't think that will happen, you haven't been paying attention.

Total and utter idiocy.
Try engaging brain first.
My ISP supplies me with a cable modem/wifi router.
It can connect to *any* device that supports ethernet or wifi.
It connects to chromecasts, phones, tablets, laptops, desktops, google home mini, random crappy IoT device (possibly running Linux) etc.
It knows virtually *nothing* about what these devices are or what OS they run.

Any you're saying that all this is going to be replaced by some undefined future technology which hasn't even specified yet which will sort through all those devices and work out which sort of device it is and if it is running an 'approved' operating systems and bar the ones that are not?

Even though none of these devices really currently support any way to do this reliably or at all in many cases?
Do you have evidence of all the worlds ISPs and device manufacturers meeting together to discuss their evil plan to cost themseleves huge amounts of money for no real gain? Because obviously they need to agree an entirely new 'secure device protocol' to communicate between every device and every ISP to supply the necessary infromation.
Have you ever heard of tethering? Using one device's internet connection to connect another device?

Is the world goverment consipiring to secretly make this compulsory in all nations?

Basically, your evil plan might have had a chance of sucess back in the days when 99.99% of consumers used their internet connection to connect one Windows PC or one Mac. 'The goverment' could have stitched up some laws and agreements with Apple, MS and the ISPs to force some sort of trusted device model on consumers. That time is long gone.

Re:Personal Computing is dead

[Anonymous Coward]

Licensing always killed it at least for small deployments. In fact it's hard to even find how much a Windows Server license for thin client access costs ; my go-to online store has always sold Windows, Windows Server and packs of 5 CAL (Client Access License) the latter doesn't give you TSE/RDS licenses.

In an alternate reality we could have had a Windows XP Home for 4 users, say (and have MS Hearts work with it). lol I guess Windows XP would work better with four users than Windows 10 does with one.
But, home users and small businesses would probably complain about stuff not working (game not working, drive or printer on the wrong machine, everything breaks down if a network cable is cut or a router reboots etc.)

Yes there is Unix/Linux but this about requires an admin. Hence I saw hundreds and hundreds of thin clients at university, running on a half dozen SGIs and Suns (that we had no idea how they looked like)

Re:Personal Computing is dead

[Anonymous Coward]

maybe this will at least encourage them to clean up the office code base so it runs for efficiently on their cloudy mainframe

Re: Personal Computing is dead

[Anonymous Coward]

I think this is a future we can all look forward to.

Re: Personal Computing is dead

[Anonymous Coward]

Wtf are you talking about.

Re:Personal Computing is dead

[Anonymous Coward]

Replace the name PC with "dumb terminal", the name "cloud" with mainframe, and the the billable period of month with "CPU second" and you have exactly the IBM paradigm that got Microsoft their start by providing a far saner desktop-local alternative to.

It just dawned on me that hardware corporations [Intel] may not allow software giants make us passive users of dumb terminals. Centralized computing is not advantageous to them. They may want intensive computing everywhere. That is reassuring.

Re:Personal Computing is dead

[Anonymous Coward]

It worked in the days of 100 megabit fiber between buildings too.
But I wasn't given even a desktop, just a window manager (motif) and a login shell with black text on white background which kills all your stuff if you close it (oh crap!)
So in my .login file I made a terminal spawn with white or green on black, and an xclock. Between vi and graphical emacs, I chose to download and compile a text editor (nedit).
A decade later I tried mwm on the latest Linux Mint! It works but the default background was pitch black. Why??? This Unix/Motif set up had nailed it, as did Windows 95 and 2000.. it had some light blue color shade, maybe stolen from Windows 2000. This is the only relevant information in my post. Computers used to have a default background even if you didn't use a background picture at all. Atari ST had a garish green.
I think it only lacks a Windows 1.0 task bar to be usable or a clone of Windows 3.1's Program Manager. I didn't find the CDE desktop (which I never used, but is very infamous). At least there is alt-tab and alt-f4.

Re: Personal Computing is dead

[NicknameUnavailable]

That's too heavy-handed in my opinion, UBI is generally more humane. Everyone shouldn't be backed into a corner of "work forever with no hope of retirement," as would manifest if you did as you suggest. Additionally, it does nothing about the upper income brackets because it's not actually a bracket - most (competent) business owners don't take more than 50k in salary - the home, car, vacations/travel, dining, etc is directly from their company (and what they do take is often in the form of renting the land their company leases for the sake of having a different form of income that hedges against the risk of being pushed out by their board.) What you're suggesting would effectively still have the musical chairs problem (when the music stops in an industry and everything is largely automated whoever has the reins owns it forever,) and in addition it consigns even people who WANT to break themselves for 20 years straight to a life of suburbia at best due to the wage caps. UBI has enough to cover living expenses for everyone just on what we already pay for social programs. The reason it fails with social programs is because most of that budget goes into monitoring of how people are spending their assistance to babysit everyone. You're taking entirely the wrong tack by saying "we need to prevent these people from becoming addicts because they're too incompetent to do it themselves," if that's the case LET THEM voluntarily remove themselves from the genepool, don't make everyone else suffer for it (even the people "supporting" those programs by working pointless jobs auditing people would be better off on the UBI they'd get out of it. People are creative, they will find shit to do if they don't waste their lives burning out 40 hours a week only to want to sleep and do it again - bored people create things - creativity alleviates boredom and spawns new industries.

Re: Personal Computing is dead

[NicknameUnavailable]

It's really not "who knows" - take away Excel from a company (basically most of them) who are dependent on it for tracking inventory, accounting tasks, estimates, etc and you'll see that company die within a year. The bar on quantity of work required went up to compete with other companies with those tools, but the fact it's automated (even only to the extent of Excel) still puts lots of jobs out of sight and out of mind (the fact that's obfuscated since it started in the 80's and it was a roughly fixed some is irrelevant.) Corporations of even small sizes used to have entire rooms of people on typewriters and sorting paperwork, most of which were reduced to a single person with an Excel license. This is even worse in that many of those jobs arose to fill the time of women joining the workforce and utilize them to make production more efficient - it worked but wages scaled down - now that those positions have been automated everyone still has to work twice as hard as they need to, only the guys at the top keep any of it.

Re: Personal Computing is dead

[NicknameUnavailable]

This is strange, how did this post get so big score? Yet it suggests that getting efficient means loss for the economy. I am in no way libertarian nor neoconservative, but it looks to me like Smith's candlemakers again.

I am largely conservative, but that doesn't change the rationale (you did interpret it a bit off though.) I'm all for automation, but not recognizing the issues with it has the potential to launch us into an actual national collapse-level depression - not 100 years out, but within my lifetime, probably within the next decade. That's something I care about because while I enjoy the prepper culture and wargaming scenarios therein - I don't actually want civilization to collapse. UBI is a really simple fix we don't even have to pay more into to achieve (AND it can scale easily with automation by changing the taxable amount.)

Re:Personal Computing is dead

[sad_]

you still have options to keep it personal, if you really care so much, take those options!

Re: Personal Computing is dead

[Anonymous Coward]

Write a script that saves me an hour per week, and I have to report it on some tax form? Why would I ever report that? How would a tax auditor ever know? What are you going to do, snapshot what I spend all my time on ever year and then look to see if my job has somehow gotten easier, and then if anything has gotten any better, that's evidence that I should pay a tax? You would have to employ a person full time just to watch me.

Your idea can't be enforced, because people like me would try to prevent that, and I think I could win.

It's not that I don't want your UBI to be funded, but for it to be funded mainly by The Thing I Do is .. well, you can understand why I'd resist, don't you?

Because it's computationally intensive

[astank]

To run a Word Processor.

Windows and all HW-V has this functionality alread

[Anonymous Coward]

FUCK YOUR DECEPTICON FEATURES

Please explain this to me...

[RecycledElectrons]

Please tell me, does my Virtual Desktop connect to a Microsoft server in the cloud, or can I run my own server?

Re:Please explain this to me...

[Anonymous Coward]

I know /. doesn't bother to read the article, but you obviously didn't even read first and last lines of the f*cking summary.
(Hint: The first line says it's Azure, and the last line says you'll be charged for your Azure usage.)

tl;dr: Yes it does, and no you can't.

Re:Please explain this to me...

[Anonymous Coward]

VDI already does, along with other similar Hyper-V services going back a decade. From what has been presented, this is simply a Type 1 hypervisor variant.

So, is it WMD or WVD ?

[fahrbot-bot]

Either way, I hear Iraq won't have -- I mean, subscribe to -- them ... sorry MS.

Re:So, is it WMD or WVD ?

[WoodstockJeff]

I thought it was short for "Windows Made Difficult".

Re: So, is it WMD or WVD ?

[Anonymous Coward]

The submitter didn't know and wanted to make sure he'd be wrong either way.

Pfft what ever azure

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been saying microsoft should virtualize the desktop for YEARS. There needs to be a clear separation of the OS from the user. Pushing it to Azure instead? pfft fail.

Re:Pfft what ever azure

[Anonymous Coward]

But then you'll have to virtualize the virtualizer, and virtualize the virtualizer virtualizer, and ... until you run of 64bit address space or CPU rings.

and no neutrality and low caps will kill cloud onl

[Joe_Dragon]

and no neutrality and low caps will kill cloud only ideas. Also areas with poor bandwidth can't really use cloud only apps.

Now any rules about storing data with an 3rd party may also make this not work as well.

Azure Remote Desktop Services comes back?

[Anonymous Coward]

So, Microsoft did once do this. You can still see hints on line of "Remote Desktop Services", which they announced and then retired before it left preview. They said that it was being replaced by a Citrix product.

Guessing that people decided, "if I have to use Citrix, why bother at all?" so they didn't bother even starting. Sounds like it was all a fizzer.

Now. looks like the idea's back - limitless virtual desktop scaling for enterprises, and hopefully it'll stay with Microsoft this time. For a company, this is great - compliance like HIPPA becomes a non issue if nothing is ever downloaded to the local computer. You can drive things on any type of computer. Confidential files aren't lost on laptops in the back of taxis -- because they were never on the laptop. Disaster and the office burns down? Azure will scale to meet you suddenly needing a thousand virtual PCs today when you only needed three yesterday.

Re:Azure Remote Desktop Services comes back?

[jimtheowl]

"Confidential files aren't lost on laptops in the back of taxis"

Indeed they are not. They are lost Instantly.

Kinda like CP/M86?

[kurt555gs]

I'm dating myself on this one.

Re:Kinda like CP/M86?

[fibonacci8]

Well, it's not as if anyone else would date you.

What is old is new again

[Anonymous Coward]

Wasn't the idea behind multi-user OSes kind of exactly the same thing? Each user got their own, independent VM, with essentially no way to communicate between virtual machines.

I'm sure that's what it was. And I'm sure those ideas were developed with things like MULTICS, which would make them something like, oh, fifty to sixty years old.

Millenials: can't be bothered to read, so are cursed to reinvent, making all of the same mistakes again as if they are being made for the first time.

Please explain RDP to me...

[Anonymous Coward]

I was thinking RDP. Goes well with the virtualization I do at home.

Can't wait.

[malditaenvidia]

I'm excited about Microsoft finally turning our PCs into always online dumb terminals. The future is now.

Windows E7?

[Anonymous Coward]

Where can I get Windows E7? That would be a bigger number than E3 and E5.

isn't it ironic?

[JustNiz]

Microsoft started out exactly by facilitating and evangelizing the giant move AWAY from connecting to a remote mainframe, and just having localized computing power on each desk.

Re:isn't it ironic?

[Agripa]

It is not evil when they do it.

Thin Clients again

[paugq]

So now that the Internet is as fast as a LAN for many users, we can go back to thin clients and subscriptions, which provide a stable revenue for Microsoft. Very well.

Re:Thin Clients again

[modmans2ndcoming]

For enterprise...and frankly, if they added a free desktop to my office 365 home subscription, I would probably use it. I store a lot of my stuff on OneDrive so being able to be somewhere and get access to my stuff from a desktop I know I own and control (control with respect to people I am not in a subscription relationship with) would be nice.

Re: Thin Clients again

[Anonymous Coward]

You are a tool.

Re:Thin Clients again

[Anonymous Coward]

This solves the storage problem for this little VM desktop.
Having a hundred gigabytes or more, at fast (enough) speed would be great. Those complaining about bandwidth and Internet while also right in their own right, may not realize this can be a huge bandwidth saver as well. Best case you're maybe doing something like indexing, batch conversion, OCR or just shuffling things around with 100GB of data and your desktop will show no change when running (if it does, minimize the application or put a notepad window before it) and thus use approximately zero byte.
If your Internet is slow you'll just have frame skips and/or a lower quality.

Me? If it was free I think I would use it for Winamp. (Or Audacious cross-compatible on Windows and Linux, or deadbeef linux-only). With this kind of software you can drag a directory to the playlist window and it will just work even if it's a 400MHz PC and you're adding 8,000 tracks from a 10BaseT network. Rather than scanning shit for hours it just gets all the filenames from the file system in one go and when you scroll the playlist it fetches tags on the go. Why not do just that? Shuffle is just shuffle.

Shit! All I need is a linux VM with one fraction of a CPU and 256MB RAM (less than half that in fact), the expensive part is the 100+GB storage (but it can be quite slow).

On another note, maybe Microsoft was really right when they wanted to do a semantic file system like 14 years ago. This semantic shit is mostly unworkable (because nobody will be arsed to fill in the data manually on 45000 files, agree on words, or they'll spam it with crap like we have "sent from my iphone" and "sent by tapatalk"). But imagine dragging your whole directory and in one operation your Winamp got all the mp3 tags without opening 400, 8,000 or 40,000 files.

Re: Thin Clients again

[Anonymous Coward]

You are a bolt.

Not a "virtual desktop'

[l2718]

Sorry, but the term "virtual desktop" already has a meaning: it refers to having a logical screen larger than the physical screen. Microsoft is offering remote desktop functionality, not a virtual desktop.

Same as before

[thunderclees]

It looks like M$ has completely given up and decided to become Alphabet.

How will this differ from Remote Desktop Services?

[Anonymous Coward]

We already run 60+ virtual desktops connected via thin client off of 2 Windows servers running vSpace. Is the Azure service option going to be limited to customers running Azure Active Directory Services? Not to mention, is all of this going to be limited to Enterprise licenses?

Re:How will this differ from Remote Desktop Servic

[Anonymous Coward]

So, here is it on Windows 10 version 1607 and later (the permanent upgrade treadmill version) : how to run or get Windows E3?

I never knew quite it yet, but Windows 10 Pro can get upgraded to E3 and then downgraded back if the subscription lapses. It's just some license check thing in fact, they say no key, no reboot.
But you don't escape the upgrade treadmill : no LTSB, no LTSC.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/deployment/windows-10-enterprise-e3-overview

So in theory I can use my one-man company to register to E3, upgrade Windows 10 Home to Pro on a crappy laptop, and then "unlock" that to Enterprise E3 and then go back to Pro to avoid eating cat food on rough months. Or I have to be a pirate if I want to run Windows LTSB!

Oh shit you do need Azure AD to get Windows E3 but maybe you can subscribe to E3 and don't bother setting a physical desktop up.
From the first link in the slashdot story there this, which led me to think you don't need to worry about AD Azure thing (surely that was set up by them already)

We’re excited to offer this service to Windows 10 Enterprise and Windows 10 Education customers. Once you sign up for Windows Virtual Desktop, you only need to set up or use an existing Azure subscription to quickly deploy and manage your virtual desktops and apps. The only additional cost to you is for the storage and compute consumption from the virtual machines themselves, which will live in your Azure subscription. You will be able to take advantage of any of your existing Azure compute commitments, including Azure Virtual Machine Reserved Instances (RI).

Well, maybe every Azure user/subscriber is an Azure AD user. Regardless what they do on their own machine. I presume it's always in the background when you log in to their website and stuff. Could you set up your Azure and shit on an Android 4.4 phone's browser? Then use MS-DOS 3.3 on a 286 PC with network card to ssh into a linux VM (or even Windows VM) on Azure. Well that's a stupid example but I came up with it.

Client device?

[Dunkirk]

This is clearly a corporate thing. What are employees going to use to access these virtual desktops? A PC? You're sure not going to use a smart phone!

And to do what? Run Excel? Who's going to be happy with a remote display to run Excel?

I'm really missing the value proposition here.

I dont get it?

[schweini]

What's the difference between this and a Windows Terminal Server?
Do they offer a full VM to each user? If so, why? If not, what's the difference to the multiuser tech they have (kinda) had for decades?

Re:I dont get it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Full VM per user seems popular, if totally wasteful. It's the "VDI" stuff but even many years ago something like a server with 8 CPU, 8GB RAM was considered low end (talking of a physical host). Now it might even be possible for your hypervisor to deduplicate RAM (so a few hundreds MB of Windows garbage would be stored once in RAM and not 16 or 24 or 40 times). Also a couple SSD are a cheaper alternative to a RAID 10 of eight 10k rpm hard drives.
You will probably be more efficient (regarding system resources) with an old-style multiuser machine with 40 users but that's less important than 12 or 15 years ago and there's shit like scheduled reboots (we're talking Windows) or even security concerns or random issues.

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Who wants this? I would have loved to have this in a linux with XFCE or LXDE version but this would mean renting all that shit by myself (I'm especially concerned by the storage costs) or creating my own cloud company while I was a loser.

Re:I dont get it?

[swb]

Modern hypervisors can do copy on write memory sharing between VMs.

I've been running a POC for VMware's Horizon View VDI system and with 10 test users logged in we see something like ~30 GB memory shared.

IMHO, the problem Microsoft never managed to get right was user profiles. They're too clunky, which is why you seldom see roaming profiles in use.

This would have been nicer...

[Wolfrider]

When Win7 was still the main desktop OS, before Win8 came out, and before MS crapped all over their user base and proved multiple times that they cannot be trusted. The smart ones have been using anything-but-windows for years now.