Microsoft sabotages Windows-via-the-cloud services

EMC VMware made much of its dual-prong approach to overcoming challenges in cloud infrastructure with its vCloud Suite and end-user computing arena with its new Horizon suite. A great deal of work remains, but the goal of these two suites is to eventually provide a holistic approach stretching from the user’s desktop (whether a traditional desktop or mobile device) all the way through the infrastructure nuts and bolts that allow delivery of application services.

Missing in the myriad PowerPoint presentations was VMware’s VDI product, VMware View. It doesn’t seem to fit into either suite and is left floating somewhere between cloud infrastructure and end-user experience delivery without a clear home in either.

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Part of me hoped to see View eventually find its way into the vCloud Suite so that public and private cloud operators could deliver Windows instances via the cloud (called desktop as a service, or DaaS, by the industry). It’s true that View would need to be heavily refactored to make this jump because it currently integrates directly with VMware vCenter to automate the provisioning of desktop pools and is incompatible with vCloud Director. At the moment, VMware seems to have no appetite to overcome that challenge.

The reason it lacks the appetite, though, is not because VMware sees no value in selling vCloud Director to provide DaaS. No, the issue is that Microsoft’s licensing rules have made it virtually impossible to carry off.

The case for Windows VDI in the cloud

Today, IaaS (cloud-based infrastructure as a service) is primarily used to host workloads that require a great deal of elasticity or exceptionally good connectivity to the Internet. You typically do not see enterprises shoveling their entire IT infrastructures into the cloud. That’s partially due to the perception of trust and security challenges still plaguing the cloud.

However, it’s also because there are many workloads that need to be “close” to the users. Think email servers, file servers, and applications involving bandwidth-inefficient thick clients. Moving these kinds of workloads into the cloud might make them cheaper to run and protect, but it also means that every user workstation would need to cross the Internet to get to them.

That’s why moving the actual desktop experience into the cloud makes a lot of sense for an organization that wants to fully leverage cloud computing. Doing so places the user’s desktop directly adjacent to the server resources they depend on, and it offers a wide range of mobility benefits — especially as they relate to BYOD and business continuity.

Think of how making Windows instances available on any computer, tablet, or even smartphone would be a real boon to both mobile users and to any user when the office is offline such as during an earthquake or fire. Being able to attach to your desktop from anywhere with any kind of device provides a huge amount of flexibility for users and IT departments alike.

Athough you can provision such remote desktops via shared-desktop server-based computing running Microsoft Remote Desktop (including Citrix XenApp), providing a rich user experience that rivals a full traditional desktop — such as being able to install your own software — typically requires a dedicated desktop experience. But you can overcome most of those challenges using VDI products such as Citrix XenDesktop and VMware View.

Microsoft’s licensing stands in the way

However, Microsoft has repeatedly blocked VDI from delivering on its promise by architecting its licensing terms to make it substantially more expensive to implement than traditional desktop infrastructure. In the past, you could blame Microsoft’s largely failed attempt to entice business to upgrade to Vista from XP. Had these initial XP deployments been virtualized, Microsoft might have been denied the recurring revenue stream provided by physical desktop replacements. Today, the resistance likely has more to do with Microsoft’s desire to push its own cloud-based services such as Office 365 or the fact that Microsoft does not have its own DaaS offering and sees no value in letting others provide what it doesn’t.

No matter the motivations, Microsoft has dealt DaaS a substantial blow by failing to include any of its desktop operating systems in its service provider licensing agreements via the program that lets IaaS providers rent access to Microsoft licenses to hosted customers. (It’s how services such as CloudOn deliver Microsoft Office environments to the iPad, for example.)

Instead, the only way a provider can legally offer Windows DaaS services is for the customer to buy its own Microsoft Windows license for devices (either Windows 8 with Software Assurance or Windows Virtual Desktop Access licenses, depending on the device). That completely eliminates the pay-as-you-go benefit of using the cloud.

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Worse, the provider also has to ensure that the underlying hardware running the virtual desktop is fully dedicated to the customer and not used to run anyone else’s workloads — destroying any hope of delivering on the scalability and elasticity goals of the cloud by undermining the cloud’s fundamental multitenancy architecture.

DaaS providers try to work around Microsoft

Despite a few less-than-legal missteps (OnLive, for example), some of the more determined DaaS providers have found ways around this. Instead of jumping through the necessary hoops to offer Windows-based desktops, they’ve adapted Windows Server 2008 to act as a desktop, generally with the help of the Desktop Experience pack that makes Windows Server look and act like Windows 7.

Because Windows Server 2008 and the Remote Desktop Services client-access licenses (CALs) are both included in the SPLA licensing program, DaaS providers can simply use Windows Server as they’d use a Windows desktop. Because the SPLA program allows use of Windows Server via a per-user Server Access License (SAL) rather than per-server licensing, this work-around doesn’t cost as much as you might imagine.

However, it’s a work-around at best. It’s clear that Microsoft has no interest in letting users take advantage of DaaS in the absence of having one itself. Although I’m not a lawyer and I’d be surprised to find it’s acting illegally, there’s no question it’s self-serving and anticompetitive, stifles innovation, and goes against the interest of the user base. In other words, it’s exactly what we’ve come to expect from Microsoft.

I hope we’ll see market pressure and the ingenuity of the first wave of DaaS providers push Microsoft into adding the Windows desktop OS into the SPLA program and getting rid of the outright ridiculous multitenancy restrictions on existing licenses. But I wouldn’t put money on that bet. The sad fact is that, until Microsoft reverses course, the true promise of DaaS and even IT as a service can’t be fully realized.

This article, “Microsoft sabotages Windows-via-the-cloud services,” originally appeared at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Matt Prigge’s Information Overload blog and follow the latest developments in storage at InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.