Announced at last year's Ignite conference, Microsoft today announced that Windows Virtual Desktop is generally available worldwide. It can be used for a multi-session Windows 10 experience and it's optimized for Office 365 ProPlus. Moreover, the Windows Virtual Desktop client is available now for Windows, macOS, Android, iOS, and HTML5.
Moreover, businesses will be able to ease the transition from Windows 7, being that the end of support is coming in a few short months. You'll be able to use Windows Virtual Desktop to run Windows 7 in a virtual environment, and that will come with free extended security updates (ESUs) for three years, something that regular Windows 7 users will have to pay for.
"Windows Virtual Desktop helps us to make our employees work in a secure manner wherever they are,” said Jake Hovermale, chief technical officer, BEI Networks. "Windows Virtual Desktop provides the Windows 10 desktop experience that our employees are familiar with across a variety of devices or web browsers."
Microsoft made a lot of improvements to the service since the preview was introduced earlier this year. It added FSLogix containers into Office 365 ProPlus, allowing it to run in virtualized environments. There's also support for making MSIX containers "attached" to a virtual machine, rather than installing them on that machine. This is meant to decrease storage taken up.
Microsoft says that it's going to continue to invest in virtualization, and it will have more to share in the coming months.
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