Azure Virtual Desktop is Microsoft’s desktop virtualisation solution. It provides organisations with a range of benefits and allows them to easily run legacy applications, secure workloads and high performance or graphical workloads easily on any machine anywhere in the world.

Azure Virtual Desktop licensing is a little bit complicated with a range of licenses and bundles available so in this article we cover everything you need to know.

Azure Virtual Desktop Licensing

Azure Virtual Desktop licensing is completely tailored to you and split into two main areas:

  • Users – Each user requires an AVD license to access it.
  • Resource – On top of the user licenses you also have to select a compute resource from within Azure. These are fully flexible and charged by the minute/hour and day for running the resource you have selected. These resources can be pooled to provide a simplified flexible option.

User licensing

When looking at user licensing for AVD there are a number of different bundles available from Microsoft that include AVD user licenses as standard. This is the first place to check, these come in two versions:

License types Bundles
Bring your own license for Windows 11 or Windows 10 – Access Windows 11 and Windows 10 Enterprise desktops at no additional cost if you have an eligible Windows or Microsoft 365 license. You are eligible to access Windows 11 and Windows 10 with Azure Virtual Desktop if you have one of the following per user licences*:

  • Microsoft 365 E3/E5
  • Microsoft 365 A3/A5/Student Use Benefits
  • Microsoft 365 F3
  • Microsoft 365 Business Premium
  • Windows 11 & Windows 10 Enterprise E3/E5
  • Windows 11 & Windows 10 Education A3/A5
  • Windows 11 & Windows 10 VDA per user
BYOL for Windows Server – Access desktops powered by Windows Server Remote Desktop Services desktops at no additional cost if you are an eligible Microsoft Remote Desktop Services (RDS) customer. You are eligible to access Windows Server 2016 and newer desktops if you have an:

  • RDS Client Access Licence (CAL) licence with active Software Assurance (SA) (per-user or per-device)
  • RDS User Subscription Licence
  • RDS Subscriber Access Licence (SAL) (per-user)**

For most organisations they should have some of the Microsoft 365 bundles providing them with the required user licenses to use Azure Virtual Desktop, with just the compute resource being required to run the solution. This offers organisations with a cost-effective approach to desktop virtualisation. If you would like to find out more about Azure Virtual Desktop. visit our services or download our Azure Virtual Desktop guide here.