DaaS and Microsoft

Have you been paying attention to the moves as of late.  OEMs are, large shops wanting an economical way to Desktop as a Service (DaaS) are, and more specifically Cloud vendors are watching.  Time for you to wake up if you haven’t been watching.


Microsoft’s latest brief on “outsourced” and VDI can be found here.

Microsoft’s latest on various Volume Licensing can be found here.

In addition to that you’ll find other various briefings on licensing from Microsoft here.

Now pay attention to Microsoft’s latest update completely but make sure to pay special attention to this blurb on page 125 (of 145) as I hear confusion on this topic often:  “Desktops delivered as a service are supported under
SPLA using Windows Server and Remote Desktop Services (RDS). If you choose to
deliver a service of this type, you must explicitly identify in your marketing
materials that this infrastructure is being used for your service delivery. The
Windows Desktop Operating System cannot be used to provide a hosted client,
hosted graphical user interface or desktop as a service.

Now if you read that above you’ll note that this means the only models to provide the desktop OS is via VDI or RDS.  You canNOT install the desktop OS to be provided as a hosted client, interface, or service.  Please don’t miss that key point.