Virtualizing Business Desktops
Situation: Business customers are increasingly moving to virtualize desktops to gain manageability and flexibility, both on individual client desktops and on centrally managed servers. Momentum and interest around desktop virtualization has been tremendous over the past year, and Microsoft has responded by issuing a licensing model to support virtual desktops. In addition to previously announced Vista operating system support for virtualization on traditional PCs, Microsoft has recently announced a detailed licensing model supporting server-based hosting of virtualized Windows desktops as well. This new model, called Windows Vista Enterprise Centralized Desktops (VECD) enables customers to deploy and run Windows Vista Enterprise in virtual machines on server hardware, and access them using remote PCs and thin clients. VECD is available to Microsoft Software Assurance customers for an annual, per-device subscription fee. The fee varies based on whether customers use PCs or thin clients to access their virtual desktops, and Microsoft has not publicly released the subscription fee schedule. This mode of licensing applies to Windows Vista Enterprise with Software Assurance, and customers can use “downgrade rights” under their Software Assurance agreement to deploy any version of Windows Professional editions (Windows 2000 Professional, XP Professional, and Vista Enterprise) in a virtual machine.
The Opportunity: There are also some new virtualization restrictions with Vista licensing. For Windows Vista versions that are allowed to run in a virtual machine (Business, Enterprise and Ultimate), users may not utilize any content or application protected by Microsoft digital, information, or enterprise rights management technology. These restrictions need to be eliminated so that customers can realize the full benefits of a virtual desktop infrastructure and realize the full value of product they have purchased.
Virtualizing Consumer Desktops
Situation: Virtualization of desktop systems is growing rapidly. Several million users of software like VMware Workstation, Fusion (for the Mac), and Player have adopted virtualization for their general purpose desktops. Consumers are clearly taking advantage of the security and encapsulation provided by VMs for reliability and flexibility on the desktop.
Consumer adoption of useful technology is inevitable. Unfortunately, Microsoft prohibits virtualizing the less expensive versions of Vista (Vista Home Basic and Vista Home Premium). Microsoft explains this as a move to protect consumers from a technology that is not broadly usable by consumers. Consumers are also prevented from transferring an OEM Windows desktop license (the license that is comes with a new PC) into a virtual machine (for example, to allow them to run the Windows XP license they already own as a virtual machine). This goes against reality of the millions of existing consumer/home users of virtualization.
There has been broad criticism of this policy from customers and industry observers (like David Berlind of ZDNet, here) who have been clear that such moves to arbitrarily inhibit the use of operating systems are unacceptable.
The Opportunity: An open model should allow customers, including consumers, to purchase Windows licenses for desktop VMs with at least the same flexibility and operating system offerings that exist today for non-virtualized PCs, whether through OEMs, resellers, or retail. This can unlock new license sales, and offer an excellent path to enable accelerated Vista adoption.