HACKER Q&A
📣 xtiansimon

Technical choices shopping for desktop virtualization solutions?


My experience with remote hosting services is limited to headless server hosting--managed,unmanaged, shared, dedicated--services. Either you're providing a service, or you need hosting for your firm. In this case my firm is the consumer.

Looking for virtual workstations for (variably) 5-10 simultaneous users for 6-months or longer. Software requirements are minimal basic business apps: Microsoft Windows OS, Miscrosoft Office 365, Chrome/Firefox web browsers, Windows-based accounting software, Python (Anaconda), and printing. Our current solution uses LogMeIn/ConnectWise to access worker's remote machines--that's the baseline user experience.

- installation of required Windows-capable software--what are the sorts of restrictions?

- user experience as compared desktop (What is persistent virtual desktop? Would you have file-tree that's not persistent?? Can I have dual-head?)

- printing capability

- We also need a dedicated server--is it common to bundle all these services on one machine or with one provider?

The Wikipedia article on Desktop Virtualization [1] describes:

- VDI service provides individual desktop operating system instances (e.g., Windows..10) for each user,

- Remote Desktop Services sessions run in a single shared-server operating system (e.g., Windows Server...).

- Desktop as a service ... Private cloud implementations...referred to as "managed VDI".

Are there performance downsides for simultaneous users? I assume I should choose a provider close to my side of the country, but only some disclose where their 'data centers' are located--others do not.

I've already sat through one sales pitch and conference call thinking I was reviewing one product, but understand now they were selling me something with a different user experience than our baseline (Please disclose if this is your business.)

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desktop_virtualization


  👤 tannerbrockwell Accepted Answer ✓
You can use Amazon WorkSpaces [1] to provision either Windows or Linux desktops in just a few minutes and quickly scale. I have used this for accessing applications that are latency bound when traveling. You can choose the specs, including GPUs which would make some applications and tasks easy to implement.

There are also apps to access your virtual desktop from your iPad.

For my needs, the costs were nominal (monthly fee + per minute) and allowed me to get work done.

[1]: https://aws.amazon.com/workspaces/