u/Antoine-UY

Hello everyone!

Long disconnected VR enthusiast (I had the Rift and Vive, way back when), who has not touched a headset since the Vive Pro in '18. Haven't been able to find time for gamping, simming or VR in the last 8 years. But I decided to get into flightsimming, and wish to try working in Windows in VR for the hell of it. PC is rather nice (RTX 5090, 2X32 DDR5, 7800X3D). All I need at this point is a nice modern VR headset.

Headsets considered:
- BB2e with eye tracking
- Megane X Mark II
- Dream Air
- whatever Decker/Frame Steam is bound to release soon

I won't be able to buy several of them for some time, and really wish for the best experience I can get for 2500$ tops. Reduced weight, crystal clear large resolution, decent FOV, not much blooming (since I will try working for several hours on end), µOLED is what I'm basically after, in that order.

1°) While the cool factor, custom-adjustment and compactness of BB2e (and Optimus videos) made me ogle at BB2e, VRSimGuy seems to heavily imply Megane X Mark II is one class beyond. Does the general consensus agree with him?
2°) Megane X Mark II has no eye-tracking, and therefore no foveated rendering. Would you say it makes a huge difference in my specific case (ie. do many flightsims/Virtual Desktops actually make good use of foveated rendering? Does owning a 5090 allow me to "bruteforce" the absence of foveated rendering and just power through while maintaining decent refresh rates?)
3°) Should I be waiting for Valve's offering to drop, even though I just got my 5090 and am eager to get into the game, or is bound to be subpar when compared to Megane X/BB2e/Dream Air?
4°) If I were to wait for something (Megane X Mark II with eye-tracking or Valve's Deckard, or something else) what would be your advice? Getting a MeganeX Mark II and reselling it to pay for the new one in a few months? Going with a cheap second-hand Quest 3 to have fun while waiting? Not buying anything?

Thank you very much for any answer you can provide.

Hello everyone!

We're a very small and fairly recent M365 full-cloud MSP. All of our customers are M365 SMB similar to us. We recently acquired and assembled for very cheap, piece by piece, something which is probably quite mundane but which looks like a Behemoth to us who never had more than a NAS and cheap laptops: a DELL PowerEdge R640 server, with 92 cores, 768GB DDR, 40TB of U.2 SSD storage, running ProxMox (PVE). On the side, we're currently building a smaller R640 server to run incremental backups through ProxMox backup (PBS).

Looking to put this server to good use, we decided to explore VDI and thin clients, and aimed our sights at starting with us for a test case. While I have in the past used Windows Server with AD DS to open local sessions, this is about as much as I know on the subject. Our goal here would be:
- to be able to run parallel Windows user sessions on our server for our staff
- both on-premise or from home
- using our Entra credentials
- and exploring the possibility of ditching our old laptops for thin clients, perhaps at some point in the future
- maybe exploring the possibility, once we master this technology, to rent Windows VMs to some of our customers for RDS application

Admittedly, this train of thought took us to a whole new world, which we had carefully avoided so far and which we understand very little about. Azure OPEX costs, FSLogix, Azure Arc, and so on. So far, we came to the conclusion that:
- what existed for Windows VDI which didn't require Citrix or some other 3rd-party were : Windows 365, AVD running an Azure pool hosted over at Microsoft, AVD running an Azure Local (Azure HCI Stack) on our server. We're interested in the latter, which yields quite a few immediate questions. Any and all help to any question will be received with much joy and gratitude, as Microsoft certainly isn't fighting its best fight rendering this VDI tech accessible to total noobs such as us. Or we might just be a little dense, which is certainly a possibility, lol. Questions are:

1°) Hardware: While what we see as the meanest/baddest piece of equipment we own is probably a pretty weak, run-of-the-mill server going by industry standards, we're certain a well-domesticated 92-core 768-GB machine could be running quite a few parallel instances of Windows 11. Do you know how many we could hope for? IS there a calculator of some sorts you trust for such estimates?

2°) ProxMox: We fell into the ProxMox rabbithole, having never used any type 1 hypervisor so far. Perhaps this is not the smartest choice, and we should really opt for a Hyper-V server instead. Could anyone with experience with both in the context of Windows VDI chime in on that?

3°) Azure Local recurring costs: As we understand it (because the pricing looks like an unholy clusterfuck to us), Azure Local presents us with its own costs. Which can be opted as a per vCore basis (9€/month a pop), or otherwise (using an online price calculator which I can't seem to use). Another way about it, considering our server has 92 cores, would be Azure Hybrid Benefits waving off any Azure Local costs, but we're unsure as to how we could enable this.

4°) Azure Arc: We have absolutely no comprehension whatsoever of whatever Azure Arc might be. While the Microsoft documentation seems to indicate it doesn't concern us in the scope of Azure Local...

Microsoft official page on Azure Virtual Desktop

...we seem to run into the evocation of Azure Arc pretty much anywhere offering us installation procedures for what we're trying to achieve. Such as here. In the end, we're not sure whether we need Azure Arc or not, but it seems to come with a price tag we're OK to pay (.01€/hour/vCore), if it's absolutely required.

5°) FSLogix: Another concept we regularly stumble upon is FSLogix. While I originally thought this was something of an "SMB/CIFS optimizer" for FileServer in Azure user sessions, it seems to be much more. To the point where certain posts and videos led me to believe, perhaps errouneously, that FSLogix now working (in preview) with Entra ID since a few months, meant we wouldn't need Domain Services (which we don't really mind) nor switching from an ENTRA-joined to a Hybrid infrastructure (which we do mind, and which terrifies us without bounds).

6°) Entra DS: If FSLogix playing nice and allowing us to use Entra ID (through ENTRA-joined VMs) on Azure Local is not an option and I was deceived in my hopes, at an extra cost, Entra DS seems like a way to maintain a full-cloud infrastructure. Is this what I should do? Does Entra DS provide me with a REAL domain controller I can use to suit our purpose, or is it simply a glorified LDAP, to be used for strictly for Kerberos authentication on legacy SSO applications?

7°) AD DS (on-prem or in VM): If neither FSLogix nor Entra DS can save us from it, we are willing to transition from an M365 infra to a hybrid infra. But we do feel this is going backwards and opposing the general trend and zeitgeist. If we were to do this, what would be the best way to sync our Entra down on a local AD? Entra Cloud Sync or Entra Connect?

8°) Nerdio: We were advised, through different channels, to look into Nerdio to drive our costs down when using Entra Local. Does anyone have experience with that? I set up a meeting with them, and should receive an explanation from them directly as to what they could help us with cost-wise.

9°) Anything I'm not considering yet: I'm sure I'm still missing a lot from the big picture, and will gladly receive any and all input from anybody with expertise or first-hand experience with running Windows VDI on an on-prem server for a full-cloud small org.