Forum Discussion
The expensive adventure of giving Microsoft WVD a try
TJ3012 I'm sorry to hear that your experience with WVD did not go as you'd hoped. Having read your post, it sounds like you jumped into this preview without taking into account the architecture of the environment or the financial ramifications of provisioning resources within a cloud service. It is not unreasonable for there to be a cost associated with bandwidth, virtual appliances, virtual machines, etc., even if you're not using them in production. While I, too, would appreciate some sort of preview discount on the associated compute resources, I do not expect one given that the only functionality in preview is the managed back-end infrastructure (the broker, load balancing, etc.), and that's actually free; we're only paying for the VMs the users would connect to.
I hope you learned something more than "the cloud is bad/expensive" while working on this endeavor, and encourage you to revisit these and other cloud services in the future after completing the requisite amount of research and planning to ensure your needs are met. Also, remember: not every cloud service is right for your environment, and that's okay too!
Blastfire maybe you noticed that I mentioned my Azure AD / Intune / Hybrid Pilot environment, which I am currently piloting for a company with 100k+ Windows clients. So I am not completely unaware of cloudservices and related cost.
Providing a new service in preview with the management component for free (wow, seems it provided only an error code and a non-op setup after multiple attempts) and getting charged for all the components which are required by a still non working WVD trial is a quite a new experience working with MS preview cloud services for more than 3 years now and being in IT-network/Server business for more than 30 yrs.
Maybe the service is a little more complex than MS preview tutorials ......
To give it a try in isolated manner, you can create a VM, promote it to a DC, and then deploy WVD with it. Then, scrap it up after working with it. To further save the cost, if you deploy RDS based VM (you need RDS with SA to access it though) - you can add a domain controller function to it and promote it to DC, and decommission the original AD - so you get only one VM. Azure VPN services isn't a consumption plan, behind the scenes you get HA setup of networking infrastructure. Also, most of your problems weren't relating to WVD itself, rather than it requires AD-connectivity of any sort.
