If you have a need to run a traditional RDS Server Environment under AVD, the license requirement is just an RDS CAL with SA through Volume Licensing or an RDS CAL via CSP Server Subscriptions.ĪVD is an M365 licensing entitlement, and bearing in mind that most organisations are already subscribed to a 365 Subscription, it will either already be included in what they are already paying for, or it will be a small increase in licensing costs to obtain the entitlement to run AVD.

With RDS, each user will require a Remote Desktop Services Client Access License (RDS CAL), for AVD, this is not a requirement, and lastly you are creating a multi-session VM based on the Windows 10 OS, something you cannot compliantly do anywhere else. For the AVD Session Hosts, you do not need to license the OS, you are charged at the Linux Compute rate in Azure.

The former include terminal servers that run independently in the cloud. Lets start with the rules that Microsoft have broken for this service, that you cannot get away with anywhere else. Microsoft offers cloud and hybrid deployments on the server side.

Terminal server azure