I want to set up 5 powerful computers to run Mechanical Engineering software in my home office, and give remote access to my contractors on a daily basis. Which remote access works best for me? (alien.top)

submitted 10 months ago by imp0ster666@alien.top to c/homelab@selfhosted.forum

21 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I am an independent contractor that contracts out to my interns that are spread around the whole country. I am still a small business that would like to make an efficient and affordable setup. So far, I have figured that for $500 a piece, I can buy pretty good refurbished PC from ebay and set up my software on them. What is the best bang for buck remote access I can deploy to have very smooth remote access system going on? I have read that windows RDP is a free option. Is there a exponentially better paid option that won't break the bank for me? What would you guys recommend?

Another reason I want to do this is that we don't have to deal with file transfer back and forth. I would like to keep the files in these computers. This bring me to my next question. Is it possible to set up a single drive that contains all the files and no matter whichever computer they have remoted in, they would save the files in one central location?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[-] OkBandicoot2958@alien.top 1 points 10 months ago

There are two ways to approach this: For $500 a pop you can build a pretty decent desktop with current hardware with warranties for that piece of mind. Or, you can head on to eBay and get something like R730 server for $600-$700 with dual 20 core CPUs and decent amount of RAM. Use Free versions of Citrix Hypervisor or XCP-NG as your OS and deploy as many Windows VMs as you need. Then setup snapshot schedule for each vm for backups, configure RDP, and off you go.

this post was submitted on 14 Nov 2023

2 points (100.0% liked)

Homelab

371 readers

2 users here now

Rules

Be Civil.
Post about your homelab, discussion of your homelab, questions you may have, or general discussion about transition your skill from the homelab to the workplace.
No memes or potato images.
We love detailed homelab builds, especially network diagrams!
Report any posts that you feel should be brought to our attention.
Please no shitposting or blogspam.
No Referral Linking.
Keep piracy discussion off of this community

founded 11 months ago

MODERATORS

communick@selfhosted.forum

rglullis@communick.news