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 1 year ago by imp0ster666@alien.top to c/homelab@selfhosted.forum

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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?

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[-] OkBandicoot2958@alien.top 1 points 1 year 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

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