Microsoft1K AVD instances will cost at minimum $87,600 a year for 24/7 AVD operation. .01 vcpu x 1000 = 10 per hour. 10 x 730 hours per month = 7300. 7300 x 12 = 87600. I hate this charge and think its horrible. As i understand this charge is from the hear of the AVD team and they refused to let it run on HCI for free. Very short sighted and I would love to talk to them in person. I fully expect someone in Microsoft Licensing will get smart and add AVD user based licensing for free to EVL agreement's under some program like upgrading seats to E5 including AVD access license and this removing the .01 per vcpu.
now you are more likely to deploy more than 1 vcpu per user. So now your math gets more complicated.
Also, how many of what type of users are we talking here? Light to heavy?
16 heavy users would run on a 64 core host costing $35K
384 light users would run on a 32 core host costing about $20K per node.
So MS usually talks about running 4vCPU per user vm.
so now lets look at the math
4 vcpu x 1000 VM’s = 4000 vcpus
.01 x 4000 = $40.00 per hour.
so 40 x 730 x 12 = 350,400 per year to just pay for AVD.
see my point on why this .01 per vCPU is crazy town?
why should you pay microsoft 29k a month to run AVD for 1K users on your own hardware?
so.. looking at the totsl solution your in for 60-90k i am guessing for the hardware for 1k light vm users. 3 nodes and the RDMA switches for S2D replication between the nodes. If heavy users… you could only run 256 heavy users on a 16 node cluster. Costing you 580k maybe? So you would need 4 16 node setups… so 2.3 million? I assume you could work out a discount. 😀
so you need to find out your user profile.
and now we can also start to talk about windows multi user/session sku.
that throws the whole calculation of VCPU’s out of wack. Cuz now yur going to give 4-16 vcpus to a MS windows 11 vm. Now yur going to try and pack 4 heavy to 50 light users on it. Your math is all different. Costs can go way down for AVD costs. Sure but not all apps like being on multi user/session windows 11. So you have to do your homework and trial and error. Visual Studio is one example. While you maybe can get it to work on MS it is NOT supported and thus not recommended for use. So your back to 4 vcpus per vm per user running VS. but MS edition is cool, it has tons of plus if it can work for your workload. Just your mileage will vary.
now you also have the cost of the Azure HCI stack hardware and the licensing. Let me be blunt. Buy EVL datacenter cores with SA over paying 10.00 per core per month to azure to license the stack. It usually saves money around year 2/3. And over 5-10 years its a no brainer. (Just buying SA for life)
i hope someone from MS comments on my comments at some point. As i am working on a 6K user plan at the moment… its just a matter of time till I get on a call with these folks..
just because everyone is dropping Horizon due to Broadcom is n reason to try and stick it to us with this .01 vCPU AVD fine, We see it for what it is. Maybe they are right and we should just stop using windows? Thats what kind of conversations happen in the board room when this math is looked at.
