Microsoft To Bring Multi-User Virtualization To Windows, Office With Windows Virtual Desktop Service

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.

Much as I hate Microsoft

[GerryGilmore]

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

Re:Much as I hate Microsoft

[msauve]

But give them points for honesty.

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re: Much as I hate Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

No thanks. You can keep it

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Is that a venereal disease?

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[ole_timer]

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

Personal Computing is dead

[110010001000]

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.

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[110010001000]

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.

Re: Personal Computing is dead

[NicknameUnavailable]

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.

Re:

[NicknameUnavailable]

Never suggested automation wasn't good.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

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 produ

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[NicknameUnavailable]

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 la

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[mangastudent]

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 bankrupt

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[NicknameUnavailable]

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 so

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[comodoro]

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.

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[NicknameUnavailable]

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

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[Zaelath]

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?

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[The123king]

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

Re:Personal Computing is dead

[msauve]

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.

and no neutrality and low caps will kill cloud onl

[Joe_Dragon]

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.

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[JustNiz]

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.

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[modmans2ndcoming]

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.

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[JustNiz]

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.

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[modmans2ndcoming]

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

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[mangastudent]

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.

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[JustNiz]

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?

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[Rick Schumann]

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 ow

Re:

[sad_]

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

Because it's computationally intensive

[astank]

To run a Word Processor.

Please explain this to me...

[RecycledElectrons]

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

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[Anonymous Coward]

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.

So, is it WMD or WVD ?

[fahrbot-bot]

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

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[WoodstockJeff]

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

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[jimtheowl]

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

Indeed they are not. They are lost Instantly.

Kinda like CP/M86?

[kurt555gs]

I'm dating myself on this one.

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[fibonacci8]

Well, it's not as if anyone else would date you. [dilbert.com]

What is old is new again

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Can't wait.

[malditaenvidia]

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

isn't it ironic?

[JustNiz]

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.

Re:

[Agripa]

It is not evil when they do it.

Thin Clients again

[paugq]

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.

Re:

[modmans2ndcoming]

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.

Not a "virtual desktop'

[l2718]

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.

Same as before

[thunderclees]

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

Client device?

[Dunkirk]

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.

I dont get it?

[schweini]

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?

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[swb]

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.

This would have been nicer...

[Wolfrider]

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.