Windows 365: Testing a Cloud PC in Linux

[Music] welcome to another video from explaining computers this time we're going to try out windows 365 which is a new microsoft service where you can rent a virtualized cloud windows pc which you can access from any device with an internet connection and specifically as you've probably seen from the title of the video we're going to be accessing windows 365 from a pc running linux because i think that's a cool thing to do now i want to stress from the start that windows 365 is currently a fairly expensive business service and i'm not suggesting for one second that most private individuals will actually want to use windows 365 but even so i thought it was interesting to check it out to see what's going on with this cloud version of windows because you never know in the fullest of time something like this might become available for the consumer market and so with that caveat well and truly noted let's go and take a closer look so here we are running the linux distro zorrino s 16 which we're going to use to set up and test out windows 365. this was officially announced by microsoft in july 2021 as ushering in a new category of computing as i explained if we looked down here windows 365 takes the operating system to the microsoft cloud streaming the full windows experience apps data and settings to personal or corporate devices as they also noted windows 365 creates a new hybrid personal computing category called cloud pc which uses both the power of the cloud and the capabilities of a device to provide a full personalized windows experience windows 365 was made available to businesses on august 2nd 2021 and can be accessed from windows365.microsoft.com where you have to log in using a relevant account i happen to have such an account as i use microsoft cloud services in my business although if i log in like that you will see that currently my organization which is just me doesn't have a subscription to windows 365. to get a subscription we'll head on over to the purchase services section of my microsoft 365 admin center where as you can see down here it lists windows 365 as a category of service and indeed if we go down a bit further under featured it says we're showing you the products that it thinks it might want effectively and this includes windows 365 and it tells us here that windows 365 business is for smaller organizations that want a simple way to buy deploy and manage cloud pcs and there's also something called windows 365 enterprise which is probably lurking down here there it is that's for much bigger organizations that will have nothing to do with me there were also as you can see two versions of windows 365 for business the standard version of the version with a hybrid benefit and if you're wondering what the difference is because the hybrid benefit is slightly cheaper hybrid benefit here can only be used if all access is from a windows 10 pro device and so as here we're working in linux i'm going to click on details under the standard version of windows 365 business and there we are it's come up and what we need to do here is to select a plan which means a machine a virtual pc specification if we go down here you'll see that these different plans are listed in terms of the number of vcpus ram and storage required and if you're wondering a vcpu is a virtual processor which as microsoft explains represents a portion of the microsoft cloud resources assigned to a user's cloud pc and this signals very clearly how windows 365 is a virtualized cloud service in which customers rent part of a server blade which is securely shared with other users to be clear when subscribing to windows 365 you are not renting a remote standalone piece of hardware with its own dedicated processor memory and storage before i select one of these i think we should scroll down so you can see all the different plans available and what they cost and as i said at the start of the video windows 365 is rather expensive and the range of specs to render plans available starts with what one virtual cpu two gigabytes of ram and 64 gigabytes of storage and it goes down to where are we at the bottom here eight virtual cpus 32 gigabytes of ram and half a terabyte of storage which is quite a lot but costs an awful lot per month and what i'm going to select here is something roughly in the middle of this i think i'm going to select two virtual cpus and eight gigabytes of memory with 128 gigabytes of storage and i'll check my license quantity is one because i don't want to be renting more than one it could be up to 300 and we can see the cost there 38 pounds 30 plus taxes a month and everything i think therefore is now set up i'm happy with that as a little test so i'll now click on buy and of course i won't show you what happens on my screen after that but we end up here where as you can see my cloud pc is being set up or what's technically known as provisioned and before i got to this screen i had to allocate the license from the cloud pc to myself inside my organization as we can see over here we've got various things we can read as things are being set up we'll just click on through all very exciting and eventually we end up here where the cloud pc is still being provisioned this takes up to an hour as i understand it and so i'll come back to you when the process is complete greetings here i am back again and it's now a few days later as i've been building acoustic panels for my new studio anyway our cloud pc has been provisioned it did take just under an hour and if i click on opening browser it'll open it up and i'd note that whilst i have been experimenting with this on off across the past few days i've not changed anything yet so you're seeing exactly what you get straight out of the box and as you can see when you first run things up you can choose what local resources the cloud pc will have access to i'm going to allow file transfer here i could tick this box but i want to show you this initially so we'll click on allow and it'll launch up the cloud pc we have to put in our password everything here does seem to be very secure it seems to be a big focus on security with windows 365 and here we are running windows in a browser and what we're doing here is running a web-based remote desktop client and i can show you that if i just click up here on about where as you can see we're running microsoft remote desktop and if we click in our settings here we can if we wish give data on this to microsoft i happen to have turned that off we've also got a full screen icon there we'll use that we've got an icon for unpinning our controls if we wish and we've got an icon for uploading files to the cloud pc if we go down here to the menu you can see we really are running windows 10 in a web browser it will be of course windows 11 fairly soon when that is released and one of the things i find interesting is if we go down here to power we only have two options restart and disconnect slightly different to a standard windows pc because of course this is a cloud windows pc as you might have noticed we've got the icons here for excel and powerpoint and word and i do want to stress the office suite is not included as part of a windows 365 subscription so these are the same icons you get with any cleaned installation of windows if i click on these and i don't have a license i'll have to buy a license or allocate a license across i haven't done that so to be clear office is not included as part of the subscription but there are other things here we could run what should we run up let's run up say the photo application just to show you something running up and there doesn't seem to be a problem with latency here things run pretty well i said i've done nothing to this pc i have done one thing i've uploaded some pictures of my exciting panels i've been building there we are there's an acoustic panel being built and there's three on the wall and as you can see we're just running this application perfectly happily over the web i think we've also got here solitaire we've got to have solitaire on the system haven't we let's just run that as another little quick application test there we are we can run the microsoft solitaire collection [Music] and we'll just see if it's working yes it seems to be working but i can't get out but anyway we've seen we can run microsoft solitaire in windows 365. it's always important to do these critical tests we go to my pc we can bring up the file explorer there and there we are you can see we've got various drives here we've got onedrive available of course which is one means of getting data to and from your virtual pc but we've also got here the drive we purchased our c drive here which has got all the usual windows stuff in it we just do properties on this you'll see it is our 128 gigabyte drive about a quarter is used for the installation of windows and the stuff that comes with it and then we've also got here our virtual drive for uploading files to and from as you can see here we go and do an about we can find out what's uh going on with the computer there we are about your pc i had that ready and as you can see here our processors our vcpus are intel xeon platinum 8272cl cores running at 2.6 or maybe 2.59 gigahertz and an intel xeon platinum 8272cl is a 26 core server processor so clearly there was one or more of those processors in the server blade that is serving to us this cloud pc and we've got eight gigabytes of ram as you can see and we saw we got our 128 gigabytes of storage as we just had a look at that if we move down here you can see that we're running windows 10 enterprise there we are and if we flick down again we'll go down to device manager just bring that up and you'll see under here if i just open things up in general so you can see what is going on there is basically a common theme which is we're running virtualized hardware so we've got microsoft hyper-v video so there isn't a graphics card connected to this cloud pc we won't be doing any high-end video editing or gaming or other graphically intensive things on this cloud pc we've got a virtual ata device virtual cd-rom etc so there we are this is windows 365 and what i'm now going to do is to configure windows more to my liking to install some applications and then we'll run some performance tests right here i am back again all ready to test out our cloud pc and as you can see i've got running here passmark 10.1 i've just upgraded to this latest version and so we'll run all the passmark tests and this will take a bit of time and it could be tricky on this cloud pc because it hasn't got a gpu but anyway we'll let it run through see what it comes up with and in particular i'll be very interested to see the relative performance of our cpu cores memory and storage and here we are we've hit the first of the 2d graphics test and we're getting these error messages i'll just flick through them where i can and then we're getting the same thing for our directx testing in the 3d test that's hardly a surprise and again it can't find the right video adapter and there we are it's finished passmark has done its very best to test out hardware it was never designed to run and our overall patch mark score is partial because it wouldn't run everything as we can see but i'm more interested in things like the cpu mark which is not brilliant actually either is it a 2 2 20 score there seven percent that's not very good at all no point really looking at the 2d and 3d mark memory mark is a bit better 12 there and a disc mark down the bottom there is is also not terribly good and granted pass mark is probably not the best thing to use to test out the performance of a cloud pc but those i find rather disappointing results let's move on and just run a crystal disk mark which i've also installed as you can see to give another test of the storage here so we'll run these tests and it's worth pointing out this is of course testing out our virtual storage it's not testing a particular drive connected to our computer it's testing out the 128 gigabytes of storage allocated in a storage array somewhere to this cloud pc and here we are eight more spectacularly unimpressive results when you consider that modern sata ssds do several hundred megabytes a second and modern nvme ssds to a few thousand megabytes a second these results really are very disappointing i guess this is shared storage even so i think there's nothing else to say other than these are disappointing results particularly when you consider the price of renting a cloud pc and a final test i want to do is of the speed of the internet connection and i'm just going to minimize that for a second and bring up a broadband speed checker showing the results of doing a speed check on the broadband connection on the computer i'm using to access our cloud pc and as you can see i have a download speed of about 48 megabits a second and an upload of just under 9 megabits a second and these are pretty good results for an internet connection in the uk some people have got better some people have got a lot worse i know it depends where you are in the world what your view is of this connection speed but i thought it might be interesting to go back to our cloud pc and to run the same speed checker because of course when we run up a browser here and look at web pages our cloud pc is connecting to the internet from wherever it's located in a microsoft data center so let's just open up a new tab and go to the same broadband speed checker and run it here on the cloud pc and hopefully we can start it off down there and there we are we have our result which is something which is i think impressive at least to me here in the uk a download speed of about megabits a second and an upload of about 224. right i just thought i'd say a few words about remote desktop as while so far we've been accessing our cloud pc over the web using a browser it is possible to access windows 365 using a remote desktop client and indeed if we click up here you'll see there are four clients we can download one for windows mac ios and android although as you can see there isn't a remote desktop client for linux here for windows 365 and indeed even to access windows 365 from a windows machine you do need to download the new remote desktop client as using the one included with windows 10 doesn't work to access a cloud pc however with a new client installed on a windows machine you can copy a subscription url from this page subscribe using that link go through your usual login and authentication process and access the cloud pc and i found that in windows this works well and you can get on with some serious computing i've also managed to access windows 365 on my android tablet although i've had to do this using the edge browser as the android remote desktop app is only supported by android 7 and above this said performance in android was pretty appalling meanwhile back here in linux i have tried to obtain remote desktop access using various clients there's one for example called romina included here in a zorin os and unfortunately in various experiments i've had no success whatsoever accessing windows 365 using a linux remote desktop client and so right now linux cloud pc access does seem to be web-based only although if you've found a linux remote desktop client that can access windows 365 do let us all know down in the comments section windows 365 allows businesses to rent secure easy to manage cloud windows pcs and as we've seen it really is windows running in a web browser now as a private individual i'm not going to keep using windows 365 i'll be canceling my subscription i got a subscription for a month just to check it out to make this video and because i was interested but this said if the price was lower i would very much consider using windows 365 as an alternative to for example running windows in a virtual machine or running windows on physical hardware as i increasingly migrate to linux but now that's it for another video if you've enjoyed what you've seen here please press title like button if you haven't subscribed please subscribe and i hope to talk to you again very soon [Music] you

Channel: ExplainingComputers

Views: 131,045

Rating: 4.9382348 out of 5

Keywords: Windows 365, Cloud Windows, running Windows online, running Windows in the cloud, cloud-based Windows, Cloud PC, Microsoft cloud PC, Windows 365 Linux, Linux Windows 365, Christopher Barnatt, Barnatt, running Windows in Linux, Linux cloud PC access

Id: IVpiKSojHz8

Length: 19min 1sec (1141 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 12 2021