Written on Nov 08 2011 Filed under: Thin Client Hardware, Microsoft, Desktop Virtualization, Licensing 1,145 views, 8 comments

Somehow, both Brian and I were on a licensing kick this week, and I was surprised to see his article yesterday about Windows Server 2008 as a way of skirting the SA/VDA requirement at the same time I was knee-deep in Microsoft licensing fun. For me, it's not about skirting SA/VDA, but more about trying to find the most cost effective program when using non-Windows clients. 

Ask most people about what you need when using thin clients, and you'll hear "Thin client...yeah, that's VDA." I was talking to Jack last week after a conversation he had with ClearCube (yeah, they're still around...just a bit quiet outside of high security environments), and they had an interesting offering with their thin clients where they'd either:

• Sell you a thin client that you'd have to buy VDA for
• Sell you a thin client with a real Windows license that has SA

The first option is the no-brain answer. Since the device doesn't have Windows and/or wasn't purchased through the normal channels, you wind up having to buy VDA for each device at $99/yr.

The second option is interesting to me. Essentially, you're buying a Windows license for which you'll buy SA (at 29% of the cost of the license every two years), and throwing that license in a drawer somewhere since you're not actually going to install Windows on the thin client. It sounds crazy when you consider the acquisition costs ($99 for VDA, or ~$200 for a Windows license + SA), but it might be the most cost effective way to get your devices access to Windows VDI images. While the initial cost would be higher, the year over year cost would be lower. Please keep in mind that the pricing here may not represent what you actually get from Microsoft, and that anything I've come up with is essentially a SWAG - Scientific Wild-Ass Guess. I tried :)

What ClearCube is doing isn't all that groundbreaking, but it's a unique take on a problem that plagues everyone in this space - making sense of Microsoft licensing. I decided to take a look from a generic perspective, looking to use any device that does not currently have SA as a VDI client. I made two charts, one with retail pricing for Windows 7 Professional, gleaned from Amazon.com, and another with estimated pricing for Windows 7 Enterprise. I'm leaving the hardware costs out of the picture, since those are what they are. This is only to compare two ways you can get SA privileges to run/access Windows virtual machines.

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