With corporate uncertainty, declining customer support, and enormous price increases for VMware Horizon and Citrix DaaS, many organizations are looking for an alternative on-premises virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) solution and evaluating Microsoft Azure Virtual Desktop for Azure Stack HCI.
Customers looking to leave VMware Horizon will also need to seek another hybrid cloud infrastructure because Horizon is only supported on VMware Cloud Foundation.
AVD for Azure Stack HCI enables organizations to securely run virtualized desktops and apps on-premises at the edge or in their data center. For organizations with data residency requirements, latency-sensitive workloads, or those with data proximity requirements, AVD for Azure Stack HCI extends the capabilities of the Microsoft Cloud to your data centers.
Unlike Citrix, which is designed to support many different hypervisors and multi-cloud environments, AVD for Azure Stack HCI is part of Microsoft’s one stack, one data center solution, developed exclusively for Azure Stack HCI, Azure and Windows 10/11 Enterprise desktops. Using the native Azure portal, which serves as a unified management tool for Azure and Azure Stack HCI products, AVD on Azure Stack HCI simplifies and streamlines VDI deployment and management compared to Citrix. Organizations can deploy the latest fully patched images quickly and easily using the Azure Marketplace images and use their pre-existing Windows 10/11 Enterprise licenses.
AVD on Azure Stack HCI also achieves optimal performance by utilizing RDP Shortpath for low-latency user access, delivering a better experience for virtual desktop users compared to Citrix.
AVD for Azure Stack HCI supports Windows 10/11 Enterprise multi-session, which allows multiple concurrent interactive sessions. This can improve your user experience and significantly reduce cost when compared to Citrix.
For a typical user’s virtual desktop usage of 160 hours per month with a virtual single-core processor, AVD for Azure Stack HCI is priced by usage at $.01 per virtual core per hour and would cost around $1.60 per month (even lower using multi-session with better server-side efficiency). With Citrix, it would cost about $10-$23 (Standard to Premium plus tier levels) per user, per month. Depending on the tier level, Citrix could cost at least six to fourteen times more than AVD for Azure Stack HCI—and that’s not considering running in a multi-session environment.
In some applications, the cost savings between AVD for Azure Stack HCI and Citrix could be more significant. Take, for example, a school district that provides virtual desktops for 500 students on thin clients that might only use their virtual desktops for a few hours a day. If the school district were using Citrix, they would need to purchase a license for every student who uses a virtual desktop because Citrix is priced per user. However, if the school district were using AVD for Azure Stack HCI in a multi-session environment, they only pay for vCPU usage, which, in this application, is far less than a typical 8-hour employee workday, resulting in a huge savings compared to Citrix’s per-user cost.
Based on our experience with deploying AVD for Azure Stack HCI with 500 users and Microsoft’s sizing guide, DataON offers two main solutions. One is a five-node cluster with switches and the other is a three-node switchless cluster. RAM, CPU, and storage (GPU is optional) will be customized for each customer by DataON after evaluating your workloads and usage. However, the guideline below will give you an approximation of how much RAM, CPU, and storage you’ll need:
| Type | Total users | Users per session host | Session host cores | Session host RAM | FSLogix usage (GB) | OS disk size (GB) | Total session hosts | Total session host vcores | Total session host RAM (GB) | Session host OS drive total (GB) | FSLogix storage (GB) | Total storage (GB) |
| Light usage | 500 | 10 | 8 | 32 | 10 | 128 | 50 | 400 | 1600 | 6400 | 5000 | 11,400 |
| Medium usage | 500 | 6 | 8 | 32 | 10 | 128 | 83 | 667 | 2667 | 10,667 | 5000 | 15,667 |
| Heavy usage | 500 | 4 | 8 | 32 | 10 | 128 | 125 | 1000 | 4000 | 16,000 | 5000 | 21,000 |
Contact us to see if AVD for Azure Stack HCI might be a good alternative to VMware Horizon and Citrix DaaS for your organization.