Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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

Posted by BeauHD on from the new-services dept.

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.

48 of 83 comments (clear)

  1. Much as I hate Microsoft by GerryGilmore · · Score: 5, Funny

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

    1. Re:Much as I hate Microsoft by msauve · · Score: 5, Funny

      But give them points for honesty.

      --
      "National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
    2. Re: Much as I hate Microsoft by datavirtue · · Score: 2

      Windows VD. Get it?

      --
      I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
    3. Re: Much as I hate Microsoft by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      No thanks. You can keep it

    4. Re: Much as I hate Microsoft by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Is that a venereal disease?

    5. Re:Much as I hate Microsoft by ole_timer · · Score: 1

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

      --
      nothing to see here - move along
  2. Personal Computing is dead by 110010001000 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re: Personal Computing is dead by 110010001000 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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.

    2. Re:Personal Computing is dead by msauve · · Score: 4, Funny

      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.

      --
      "National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
    3. Re: Personal Computing is dead by NicknameUnavailable · · Score: 5, Interesting
      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.

    4. Re: Personal Computing is dead by Zaelath · · Score: 1

      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?

    5. Re: Personal Computing is dead by NicknameUnavailable · · Score: 1

      Never suggested automation wasn't good.

    6. Re: Personal Computing is dead by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      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.

    7. Re:Personal Computing is dead by JustNiz · · Score: 2

      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.

    8. Re: Personal Computing is dead by The123king · · Score: 2

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

      --
      If you gave me a choice between a printer and a giraffe with explosive diarrhoea, i'll get my ladder and my raincoat
    9. Re: Personal Computing is dead by mangastudent · · Score: 2

      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.

    10. Re:Personal Computing is dead by modmans2ndcoming · · Score: 1

      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.

    11. Re:Personal Computing is dead by modmans2ndcoming · · Score: 1

      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.

    12. Re:Personal Computing is dead by mangastudent · · Score: 1

      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.

    13. Re: Personal Computing is dead by comodoro · · Score: 1

      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.

    14. Re:Personal Computing is dead by JustNiz · · Score: 1

      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.

    15. Re:Personal Computing is dead by JustNiz · · Score: 1

      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?

    16. Re:Personal Computing is dead by Rick+Schumann · · Score: 1

      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.

    17. Re: Personal Computing is dead by NicknameUnavailable · · Score: 1

      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.

    18. Re: Personal Computing is dead by NicknameUnavailable · · Score: 1

      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.

    19. Re: Personal Computing is dead by NicknameUnavailable · · Score: 1

      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.)

    20. Re:Personal Computing is dead by sad_ · · Score: 1

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

      --
      On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
  3. Because it's computationally intensive by astank · · Score: 2

    To run a Word Processor.

  4. Please explain this to me... by RecycledElectrons · · Score: 2

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

    1. Re:Please explain this to me... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      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.

  5. So, is it WMD or WVD ? by fahrbot-bot · · Score: 2

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

    --
    It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
    1. Re:So, is it WMD or WVD ? by WoodstockJeff · · Score: 2

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

  6. and no neutrality and low caps will kill cloud onl by Joe_Dragon · · Score: 1

    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.

  7. Kinda like CP/M86? by kurt555gs · · Score: 1

    I'm dating myself on this one.

    --
    * Carthago Delenda Est *
    1. Re:Kinda like CP/M86? by fibonacci8 · · Score: 1

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

      --
      Inheritance is the sincerest form of nepotism.
  8. What is old is new again by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    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.

  9. Can't wait. by malditaenvidia · · Score: 1

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

  10. Re:Azure Remote Desktop Services comes back? by jimtheowl · · Score: 1

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

    Indeed they are not. They are lost Instantly.

  11. isn't it ironic? by JustNiz · · Score: 1

    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.

    1. Re:isn't it ironic? by Agripa · · Score: 1

      It is not evil when they do it.

  12. Thin Clients again by paugq · · Score: 1

    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.

    1. Re:Thin Clients again by modmans2ndcoming · · Score: 1

      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.

  13. Not a "virtual desktop' by l2718 · · Score: 1

    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.

  14. Same as before by thunderclees · · Score: 1

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

  15. Client device? by Dunkirk · · Score: 1

    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.

    --
    Acts 17:28, "For in Him we live, and move, and have our being."
  16. I dont get it? by schweini · · Score: 1

    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?

    1. Re:I dont get it? by swb · · Score: 1

      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.

  17. This would have been nicer... by Wolfrider · · Score: 1

    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.

    --
    .
    == WolfriderV6 == I'm willing to admit that *I just might* be wrong... Are you??