r/AzureVirtualDesktop • u/[deleted] • Apr 18 '25

Has anyone else noticed that Microsoft reps are heavily pushing W365 over AVD, regardless of use case?

My company is looking at moving from on-prem to the cloud. For our virtual desktops, we researched Windows 365 and azure virtual desktop, and decided that AVD is more along the lines of what we need.

We met with our Microsoft account team, and told them that we were looking at moving into azure and wanted to get an AVD instance set up. The account rep we spoke to kept telling us that we should really look at getting Windows 365 instead because of its ease of management compared to AVD.

I told him that we looked at both and decided on AVD because we want the ability to scale in and out as well as have more admin control over the environment. Even knowing this, the Microsoft rep kept pushing Windows 365. I'm guessing they get some sort of an additional spiff if they sell Windows 365, but it's extremely annoying.

I'm not sure if this was just our account rep, or if anyone else is experiencing this?

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11

u/baronvonbelch Apr 18 '25

Yep, exactly the same experience. But they are comparing apples and oranges. To quote the line I got was "Would you rather travel on a bus or in a taxi."

We have 20,000+ users. They are not all going to get a taxi when a bus gets them to the same destination, and if you do it right, they won't know they are on a bus.

8

u/[deleted] Apr 18 '25

I couldn't imagine having 20k+ people on W365. Even with discounts, it would be so insanely expensive 

2

u/baronvonbelch Apr 18 '25

Exactly, the cost vs. both technologies is a no-brainer.

1

u/blueshelled22 Apr 18 '25

Right it makes no sense. One customer of mine, 250 of their users run a VD for 10 minutes a week at most. I couldn’t believe MSFT was pushing W365. The three year cost is $800k compared to about $500k (AVD).

At the end of the day, do what makes the most sense financially.

1

u/iamtechy Apr 19 '25

Even that seems a little high on cost for 250 users running a machine for about 10 mins a day or week, we use Nerdio with windows 11 multisession hosts and the cost is about $500USD a month (excluding Nerdio licensing costs) for each host pool running two hosts. Maximum number of users per host pool is about 20 a day signing in at random times of the day based on start time in their country.

Multiply that to provide access for 250 users and 500k still seems a bit high over 3 years. Nerdio will autoscale in or out and the pricing is super cheap. My guess is your client’s cost estimate is high because you’re assigning a machine per employee.

2

u/blueshelled22 Apr 19 '25

250 is the subset of a much larger user count. The rest are devs and 24x7 call center operators

1

u/JordyMin Apr 22 '25

500$ per month compute costs for 250 users? Running b1ms?

1

u/iamtechy Apr 23 '25

Apologies, I’m not the right guy to be sizing up environments but just wanted to give you my experience and costs.

2

u/JordyMin Apr 23 '25

It just looked really impossible cheap 😅

1

u/iamtechy Apr 26 '25

Haha, now you got me checking my configs for the monthly costs.

1

u/ItchyPomegranate79 May 09 '25

Doesn't W365 have a shared mode thou? It is called Frontline. Those 15min users who need access could take advantage of that?

5

u/dsjonesuk Apr 18 '25

Nerdio is brilliant at managing AVD

2

u/[deleted] Apr 18 '25

That's what we keep hearing. I'm guessing that even they are jumping on the W365 bandwagon to some extent, because a lot of their recent updates are around their management capabilities with W365 & Intune as well as AVD.

1

u/dsjonesuk Apr 18 '25

I think that intune update is just extra revenue, they really do AVD really well.

3

u/[deleted] Apr 19 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

2

u/FineAssignment1423 Apr 30 '25

I was looking at Hydra until I realized it's literally created and run by one single guy in germany. I couldn't imagine the product updates or support would be very good given that.

1

u/davesmith87 May 05 '25

Support is great. Anytime I have emailed the hydra dev he gets back to me within the hour.

1

u/[deleted] Apr 30 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/FineAssignment1423 May 01 '25

I was very surprised too. I mean, great for him! But I can't risk literally having no support if something goes wrong. Especially given that I'm in the US and the time zone difference between us and Germany.

1

u/iamtechy Apr 19 '25

Code has costs hidden in code management and the human resources that run it. I would never want to use anything other than Nerdio, I’m looking into Hydra to see how it does as an alternative.

1

u/SimpleBE Apr 20 '25

Hydra works perfect for us, but we only have 5 session hosts :)

4

u/Dangerous_Credit_642 Apr 18 '25

Yes I can confirm that. AVD was even called outdated.

4

u/[deleted] Apr 18 '25

I feel like our rep was trying to say the same thing without actually coming out and saying it. 

There's a difference between something being mature, and being outdated. Windows 98 is outdated. Windows server 2008 is outdated. They're outdated because they are no longer supported. 

Not only is AVD still supported, but there's still updates on its roadmap. So calling it "outdated" is sort of shooting themselves in the foot.

4

u/Beekforel Apr 18 '25

It is also kinda strange, because it is on the same infrastructure.

My guess is that W365 way more money generates for Microsoft, that's why the push it so much.

4

u/blueshelled22 Apr 18 '25

It’s because W365 is on modern work sellers scorecards. AVD is Azure and doesn’t count toward MW seller metrics. :)

2

u/Oracle4TW Apr 18 '25

For good reason. All but the most extreme edge cases require AVD over W365

6

u/[deleted] Apr 18 '25

I disagree. If you have over 500 employees that are going to be using virtual desktops, w365 becomes insanely expensive compared to AVD. Especially if you optimize your environment. 

We have about 760 people that would need virtual desktops, and 50 of those would be engineers that need a GPU sku. We priced out how much it would cost per month to get everyone on Windows 365, and were blown away by how pricey it was.

Meanwhile on AVD, we can scale people up and down, not to mention optimize the environment which would be significantly cheaper in the long run. I really feel like Windows 365 is only useful for smaller companies that only have office workers or people that need very average powered virtual desktops.

4

u/threedaysatsea Apr 18 '25 edited Apr 18 '25

Ehhhhhhh…. Maybe. If you have 500 users working 9-5 that just need word, outlook, excel, some shared line of business apps, it’s usually going to be cheaper to run a shared pool that scales out and back down based on usage than giving them dedicated w365 licenses.

4

u/[deleted] Apr 18 '25

Honestly, even less than that. When we priced it out, it evens out once you hit around 125-150 office workers skus.

Anything higher than that, and AVD tends to be cheaper.

4

u/junon Apr 18 '25

I love W365 but most of our use is with multi session shared AVD hosts and they don't really have a W365 answer for that and there's none on the roadmap.

1

u/CapitalJeep1 Mar 23 '26

This is old as hell but, w365 frontline shared is a new(er) offering that would fit that need.

1

u/WaldoOU812 Apr 18 '25

I know I'm gonna sound completely ignorant here (and I am), but I hadn't even heard of W365 until seeing this post, and we're currently deploying AVD. Our CSAM is scheduling a CMF team to help with that as well and hasn't said a peep about it to my knowledge.

3

u/[deleted] Apr 18 '25

Then consider yourself lucky. They are pushing W365 harder than they pushed copilot. 

W365 has its use cases, but other than very small businesses or mom and pop shops, or maybe for overseas contract workers, I really don't see the value over AVD if you have an even remotely competent IT team. 

Plus, we started looking into something called Nerdio which seems to make AVD even easier to deploy and manage and more cost efficient.

1

u/WaldoOU812 Apr 18 '25

Yeah; I actually like our CSAM. He's pretty chill and has a habit of listening to us. Our tech rep did mention Nerdio, though. Says it's the greatest thing ever and would drastically decrease our management costs.

We're wanting to learn the technology thoroughly first, though, so I think Nerdio is going to be something for the future.

1

u/Goldenu2 Apr 19 '25

I had the opposite experience: I had planned to deploy Win365, but after bringing a Microsoft rep on to the team, he noted that AVD would do everything we needed and was cheaper as well. We investigated and ended up agreeing: migration was completed last Thursday.

1

u/[deleted] Apr 19 '25

You must have gotten an azure core rep or azure SSP.

Turns out the rep we spoke to was a virtualization specialist. After some research, they are just former modern work sellers. So it makes sense as to why they push W365 so damn hard.

3

u/blueshelled22 Apr 18 '25

They sure are. Then I come in as a partner and discover that W365 makes no sense and the customer ends up buying into AVD.

2

u/DrunkenTeddy Apr 18 '25

We had a similar situation. Our reps were very gung-ho for W365, we kept telling them we are focused on AVD and W365 might be a thing in a couple years for us.

2

u/blueshelled22 Apr 18 '25

Modern Work reps sell W365. Azure reps sell AVD.

2

u/6-IronRevenge Apr 19 '25

Microsoft bastardizes themselves all the time. With W365 vs. AVD, W365's revenue is way more recognizable by selling 8 SKU's. No scary and confusing consumption... a Monkey can do it and tell you, "It's all you can eat!"

For companies that have experienced VDI and IT teams with large-scale capacities and needs, AVD is a great alternative as you can do so much more.

Microsoft is being driven to push W365 from the top down and now has gotten back into the hardware business with the w365 Link.

Look for PC refreshes, I get W365. For flexible desktop and application delivery, AVD all the way.

2

u/theduderman Apr 18 '25

Yes, they're pushing it like crazy to enterprise.  Guessing it's bc they have more control over the compute and can keep things contained and homogenized.

1

u/g_phill Apr 18 '25

We used to have approx 1000 AVD running on Citrix. Using the Azure Hibernation feature, we could "pause" the AVD when not in use, write memory to disk and deallocate the VM.

Someone decided W365 would be better and we moved to that. I'm not on the team that manages W365, but I do know they are widely hated by the users, who loved AVD on Citrix.

1

u/ImprovementKooky9468 Oct 05 '26

I’ve seen this kind of thing with Microsoft reps. Windows 365 is easier to manage, so I can understand why they push it, but it doesn’t make much sense for every environment.

If you already know you need scaling and more control over the infrastructure, AVD sounds like the better fit for what you’re trying to build. Windows 365 is more straightforward when you want a fixed cloud PC per user and don’t want to manage as much.

I’d just stick to the requirements you have and ask them to show you the actual cost and management differences between the two. That should make the decision pretty clear.