Virtual Desktops & Applications

Benefits & Features

• Pay for consumption: Cloud providers have large pools of resources and you are charged only for what you consume out of that pool.  This means that when you are hosting your virtual desktop infrastructure in the cloud, only consuming what you need is more important for cost savings.  Luckily cloud providers have a number of tools to help scale up or down your virtual desktop infrastructure to match demand.  This differs from on-premise VDI hosting where a large upfront purchase is required to buy hardware that meets your peak demand, and that hardware may sit dormant for a large portion of it's life due to the peak demand being a rare occurence.
   
• No physical hardware dependency: If the underlying server hosting your desktop fails, the desktop will automatically restart on a different host while online.  This disruption will likely be invisible to users of the system.
   
• Smaller footprint: Virtualizing desktops in the cloud decreases the number of physical boxes that the University must use. This means a smaller datacenter, with the resulting decreases in cooling and electrical costs.
   
• Hardware costs: Because virtualization allows for greater efficiency of resources, you don't have to manage any underlying physical hardware, saving money both on upfront hardware costs and on maintenance.
   
• Flexibility and agility: Desktop virtualization allows for the quick creation of different desktop environments, those environments can then be scaled up or down as demand requires.  Desktops are made available during business hours and outside of business hours there is a short delay if you attempt to log in while your machine is made available.  All of this automation saves us cost and allows us to manage the environment more easily.

Pricing

Pricing varies greatly due to the number of instance sizes available on Azure.  For personal desktops we've created the pricing table below to estimate the yearly cost per user for 3 different performance tiers (many more are available if needed) and estimated the runtime at 200 hours per month.  If you don't intend to be logged into your virtual desktop for all working hours of the week (8a-5p, M-F) then you can expect your cost to be less than the estimate, relative to the amount of working hours you expect.  Estimating the cost of pooled desktops is a bit trickier because the number of desktops running is based on the number of users logged into the system and scales up and down dynamically with load.  In general though if your performance requirements are in one of the 3 tiers below you can achieve lower operating costs with pooled desktops and we can help you get an estimate of what that would cost on our platform.

Support

For the most efficient support experience, please submit a ticket using the request form on this page. Alternatively, contact your campus Help Center location via email, by phone, or in person.