Microsoft has announced a number of upcoming licensing changes. Included in those changes are some new licenses for VDI (Virtualization Desktop Infrastructure) implementations on Microsoft products.

There will be two new licenses:

• Microsoft VDI Standard Suite
• Microsoft VDI Premium Suite

These new licenses will match the other well known license normally associated with VDI, Virtual Enterprise Centralized Desktop (VECD).

So unfortunately you will still need a VECD license and a new complimenting license for each device in which you want to connect to a VDI environment.

You do not need a VECD license for Windows 2008 R2 session virtualization. A RDS CAL (formerly a TS CAL) or a Premium VDI Suite license would be required for this.

These changes are meant to simplify the licensing requirements of VDI environments.

The VDI Standard Suite should cost $21USD per device.

The standard license covers:

• Hyper-V Server
• System Center Virtual Machine Manager
• System Center Configuration Manager
• System Center Operations Manager
• Remote Desktop Services (CAL)
• MDOP

The premium license covers the additional rights for:

• Remote Desktop Services (RDS)
• App-V for RDS

I agree that perhaps the new licenses will help simplify the licensing for large organisations when implementing a VDI solution, but I still cannot see how the average organisation can implement VDI and actually save really money.

Maybe in time I will come around.

Read more about these changes here