"Overall, when compared in a well managed office worker environment, VDI is generally 9 -11 percent more expensive than the corresponding PC environment," wrote Gavriella Schuster, senior director of the Windows commercial product management group

Schuster also noted that VDI users complain of a "diminished ... experience," due to the fact that "application performance is directly dependent on network connectivity."

The post is an attempt to help customers determine when they should use VDI, client virtualization or application virtualization, Schuster said in an interview. Microsoft will get the operating-system licensing fees no matter how the OS is deployed, so the company is "agnostic" as to the approach customers use to deliver the OS to the user, she said.

"Our enterprise customers have complex environments, and they have many different kinds of users. So there are times when VDI makes sense," she said. "Every customer will have a VDI, and we're trying to help them understand what it is good for, and what it is not good for."

The cost estimations came from a survey of about 100 enterprise customers who had spoken with Microsoft about their VDI deployments.