Microsoft makes Windows Virtual Desktop available to enterprise customers

Microsoft has made its Windows Virtual Desktop service available to businesses. With the service running on Azure, users can easily run virtualized Windows 10 and 7 environments.

Windows Virtual Desktop is available to businesses with an Enterprise or Education license for Windows 7 and Windows 10, and users of certain Microsoft 365 licenses. Windows 7 will also receive security updates within this program until 2023, something that companies without WVD have to pay extra for. Support for Windows 7 is primarily intended to allow businesses to run their legacy apps as they transition to Windows 10, Microsoft said. This is much needed for many companies, because support for Windows 7 will end on January 14 next year.

The difference between this virtualization of Windows and what is already being offered by other companies is that Microsoft offers the possibility to provide several sessions of an OS to users at the same time, instead of essentially controlling a single computer remotely. In addition, Microsoft provides tools for migrating from Remote Desktop Services.

The feature is now available worldwide, TechCrunch writes. In principle, the use of the service is free for customers with the appropriate license, but the use of underlying Azure infrastructure does require an Azure subscription. This entails its own costs. These costs depend on the scale of WVD being used.