Azure Virtual Desktop for Azure Stack HCI is coming to data centers, but users think it's not worth the price

Microsoft decided to bring the Azure Virtual Desktop for Azure Stack HCI to data centers, effectively allowing organizations, small businesses, and entrepreneurs to employ the Microsoft Cloud capabilities directly into their infrastructure.

The Redmond-based tech giant says the decision was made because even though the business world is getting into cloud capabilities, the cloud is not the best option for every business out there, and the company wanted to offer options for hybrid contexts.

IT pros face a complex and challenging environment as they help their organizations move to the cloud, especially when the cloud isn’t the best option for every workload. Managing hybrid cloud migrations while meeting the needs of today’s distributed workforce takes a comprehensive approach that balances performance and accessibility with security and control. For organizations that need desktop virtualization for applications that must remain on-premises for performance, data locality, or regulatory reasons, Azure Virtual Desktop for Azure Stack HCI may be the right solution.

Microsoft

The Redmond-based tech giant says that integrating Microsoft Cloud directly into customers’ data centers will mean a plethora of benefits for these companies, including:

• Improving performance for Azure Virtual Desktop users in areas with poor connectivity to the Azure public cloud by giving them session hosts closer to their location.
• Meeting data locality requirements by keeping app and user data on-premises.
• Improving access to legacy on-premises apps and data sources by keeping desktops and apps in the same location.
• Delivering the full Windows experience while retaining cost efficiency with Windows 11 and Windows 10 Enterprise multi-session. 
• Unifying their VDI deployment and management compared to traditional on-premises VDI solutions by using the Azure portal.
• Achieving the best performance by using RDP Shortpath for low-latency user access.
• Deploying the latest fully patched images quickly and easily using Azure Marketplace images.

To get started, businesses will have to make sure they are licensed correctly and understand the pricing model.

For example, the license that grants access to Azure Virtual Desktop on Azure also applies to Azure Virtual Desktop for Azure Stack HCI. As for the pricing, there will be 2 different fees. First, there will be an infrastructure fee, and there will be a hybrid service fee that begins on April 1, 2024, and costs  $0.01/vCore/hour of consumption.

It’s important to take the hybrid fee into consideration, as there are already users who think it’s a new service is not really worth it.

If this fee is not negotiable, for us, it’s cheaper to stay in Azure/W365 than to move this workload on-prem since the on-prem hardware isn’t free.  It’s actually more expensive if you use a premium Azure Stack HCI solution like Dell.  We wanted to move this workload on-prem to save on costs – but with this, it’s just more work.  Disappointed.

Azure Virtual Desktop user

If billing is based on ‘hours of consumption’, how is that consumption metered?  If a customer had, for example, 64 physical cores powered on and assigned to the workload (128 users), providing 128 vCores, with a light load of 1vCore/user with an average of 260 hours active work across the month*, would they be charged 260 hours x 128 cores x $0.01 per month ($333/month) or would it be based on the full 720 hours ($921/month) since on-prem workloads don’t tend to be powered down as aggressively as cloud hosted workloads.

Azure Virtual Desktop user

Other users are not really satisfied with this new solution:

I don’t see how you can justify consumption pricing for resources that we own. Shutting down the session hosts doesn’t free up resources for other tenants or change Microsoft’s resource allocation in any way. I could maybe see a justification for active connections through the Azure gateway but there’s no president for this in other Azure services. We already paid for that hardware and the licenses. You don’t get to charge me again to run it. Looks like we are sticking with RDP gateways. It’s sad because we were really looking forward to this solution.  

Azure Virtual Desktop user

Azure Virtual Desktop for Azure Stack HCI is now available. What do you think about it?