I’m curious to know if anyone in here has used virtual desktop options (like Citrix XenDesktop or AWS Workspaces) for CAD – Solidworks in particular. At this point, I’m most interested in AWS since they offer $2k of credit for nonprofits. Some concerns I have include latency and bandwidth requirements.
Provotypes currently has a BYOD policy, so we get a pretty random assortment of OSes, RAM, and graphics power. The idea here would be that students (and Windows-averse mentors like myself) could use whatever they want to access a more powerful remote VM that has Solidworks pre-installed during build season.
Quick google search seems to say no. This was in 2014 though, so things may of changed? (probably not)
I’ve done a fair amount of Googling myself, and have found an AWS option that has a GPU (search the page for GPU; it’s buried in there). That leads me to believe things have changed, hence the thread.
My experience with VM’s has been that there’s a pretty large amount of latency. I personally believe CAD is frustrating enough without waiting several seconds if you accidentally missed a click (again)
You may find it easier to just settle on a web-based CAD solution such as Onshape. I guess this won’t help if you have people bringing in literal potatoes as their devices, but our team doesn’t seem to have any major issues with Onshape, and this solves the Windows-averse mentor problem well too.
No idea how well Onshape would run on a Classmate though.
I know the Autodesk University event held at the Sands Expo Center in Las Vegas every year uses a few hundred AWS workspaces instances to run Inventor, Fusion, and other software in computer “labs” they set up in the conference rooms. All the computers are just low end terminals, yet people are still doing high end work. I was impressed, but it’s definitely not the same experience as running it locally. You can pile in resources on the AWS workspaces and certain things that would normally take a while on a desktop can actually be faster. But, there is indeed latency there, even on the best connections. In this day and age, I don’t like waiting for a computer for much of anything ever. Also, with AWS workspaces, you really have to have someone who knows what they’re doing to set it up and manage it.