Graphic Design/Engineering Machine...

[Ramham13]

I looked through the forms and found some projects that had similar results, but I'm not sure if any of them actually do everything I'm needing. So here goes...

 

I am an engineer, my wife is a graphic designer. We both need computers that can handle a pretty heavy load. The software that I use most is AutoDesk Inventor and she primarily uses Adobe Illustrator. I would like to build a tower that we can both use and have different accounts(we have different definitions of "clean desktop" and "file management"). The end result that I need is a single tower that we can log into our individual accounts from individual separate devices and run our programs without any major sacrifices. For example, she is in the living room designing something in Photoshop on her laptop while I'm in the garage working on something in Inventor but all the processing is being done by the tower in a closet. For right now I only need to be able to connect via LAN, but eventually a WAN connection would be cool.

 

 I don't know if this is possible or not. If so is it cost effective, do the client laptops have any specific hardware requirements(other than internet connection), and will peripherals(i.e. wacom tablet or 'gaming' mouse) work fine over the connection? 

 

Any help would be fantastic! 

[Electronics Wizardy]

Currently if you want multiple remote desktop sessions you need windows server or a upcomming edition of windows 10.

 

Remote desktop is always a bit slow, so really id just get higher power laptops. WIll be much a much better experience, and with laptops like the xps 15 you get almost as much power in a thin and light package.

[njmyers3]

As @Electronics Wizardy said, remote desktop doesn't give the best user experience, especially over wifi. I would second buying two powerful laptops, but if you're sure you want to stick the the powerful desktop PC, I'd run a hypervisor like Proxmox and set up two Windows virtual machines. Then you could both remote into your separate VMs simultaneously.

[Electronics Wizardy]

1 minute ago, njmyers3 said:

As @Electronics Wizardy said, remote desktop doesn't give the best user experience, especially over wifi. I would second buying two powerful laptops, but if you're sure you want to stick the the powerful desktop PC, I'd run a hypervisor like Proxmox and set up two Windows virtual machines. Then you could both remote into your separate VMs simultaneously.

you can setup vms, but if you want gpu power you either need something that can split gpu power like nvidia vgpu which is very expensive or gpu passthough that can be a pain and isn't supported that well on consumer hardware. If you want remote desktop it would probalby be better and cheaper to just have 2 desktops. And you still have the latency problems.

[Ramham13]

Thanks for the feedback so far. I understand there would be some latency problems and it would be expensive, but I think for us it would still be worth it. The part I guess I left out is that we both want to have our desktop setup as well, so we would each have a "desktop" and a laptop. So, effectively we could both have our own desktops and remote connect to it and have the same result, but I thought making one tower with two VMs would save some space and maybe be a bit cheaper. The simplest alternative would be for us to each get a desktop($2000) and a powerful laptop($2500). But that comes to about $9000 and I figured I'd cut some corners if possible.

 

P.S. I have no idea what it would cost for a machine that could do what I'm asking.

[PeterBocan]

I am totally against the whole "single PC for multiple users" schema as it introduces single point of failure into the world - the PC goes down, and both of you are screwed, for God knows how long - and who's gonna fix it for you? I think it's okay to have one media centre for music, or videos but not for work. But, that's just my opinion.

 

Firstly, I think, requiring 2500$ for a Photoshop work is a bit unnecessary, but my guess is that your wife is rocking Macbook Pro 15", isn't she? You could shave off 800-1000$ of that, if it wasn't a Macbook. So that's the very first corner I would cut off, if you want to drop down the price.

When it comes to be "a bit cheaper" than having two PCs: You could shave off the server hardware, buy last-gen CPUs of the e-bay, for example the amount of ECC memory, SSD drives and buy that later on. You could buy one 12 core brand new Intel Xeon for 1200$ or buy two hexa-core Xeons from ebay for 100$, last or second to last gen. But, you could do that with the normal PC parts too. That's where you could shave off the most of the costs. 

Also, I presume, you are not that keen Linux user who would like to spend days on QEMU and IOMMU configurations, so when you decide to go with the route of "one server" option, I would suggest you to look at the VMware ESXi/vSphere hypervisors, that costs about 1000$ per license. Or if you are a linux geek and you adore linux command line, Look up KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine).