Azure Virtual Desktop | User License requirement and impact

Question

Dear All,

We have a Test Azure virtual desktop infra, have provided access to few domain user account and they have F3 license assigned and access the infra without any issue.

We recently created 3 test domain accounts without any license assigned. As checked the users are able to access fine from domain joined devices. But when try to access from outside network, we have access denied error.

Could you please help to understand the licensing requirement here and what are all the impacts if we dont have the license assgined properly.

Answer 1

Hello @Julie M ,
Thanks for reaching out to Microsoft QnA. Happy to answer your question.

Azure Virtual Desktop pricing includes two parts. Refer to this article to first understand the 2 different components that add up to make the Azure virtual desktop pricing. I am mentioning the same below. The two parts are -

1. User access rights:
   License entitlement: There is no additional cost if you have an eligible Windows, Microsoft 365, or Microsoft Remote Desktop Services (RDS) Client Access License (CAL).
   Per user access pricing: We have introduced a new option for monthly per user pricing for access to Azure Virtual Desktop for external users only.
   Find more details below.
2. Azure infrastructure costs
   In addition to user access, you will need an Azure account to deploy and manage your virtualization environment. These are the Azure components generally required to host an Azure Virtual Desktop deployment.
   Virtual machines
   Storage
   Operating system (OS) storage
   Data disk (personal desktop only)
   User profile storage
   Networking

Licensing for Azure Virtual Desktops work in 2 ways - for internals users, and for external users.
Whether you're serving internal users or external users with Azure Virtual Desktop, you'll need to create and manage identities for those users yourself.

1. For internal users - Internal users refers to people who are members of your own organization, for example employees of a business or students of a school. An eligible Windows or Microsoft 365 license grants only the internal users the access privileges/rights to the AVD.
2. For external users - External users are not members of your organization, for example customers of a business. For external users, we configure per-user access pricing.

To understand more about the above two licensing options please first refer to document1 and then refer to document2. It is explained in great detail here.

Whether you're serving internal users or external users with Azure Virtual Desktop, you'll need to create and manage identities for those users yourself.

If you are trying to provide access to external users to your AVD setup, then you will have to create identities for them in Azure AD DS. Refer to this document to understand the two different ways explained here.

We recently created 3 test domain accounts without any license assigned. As checked the users are able to access fine from domain joined devices. But when try to access from outside network, we have access denied error.

To understand more about this, you will have to let me know what is the user access rights provided to the 3 test domain accounts.

Hope this helps. If you have any questions, feel free to reach back.

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Answer 2

Thanks srbhatta-MSFT for providing the epxlanations. I have another follow up question, not sure if it is alright to post it here. If a customer is going to use Visio, Project and Visual Studio in AVD, what kind of licensing are we looking at? Can they use the existing Visual Studio with MSDN license in AVD? Thanks.