If you’re trying to do VDI in the cloud, that can get expensive fast on account of the GPU processing needed
Most of the protocols I know of the run CPU-only (and I’m perfectly happy to be proven wrong and introduced to something new) tend to fray at high latency or high resolution. The usual top two I’ve seen are VNC and RDP (XRDP project on Linux), with NoMachine and plain x11 over SSH being right behind that. I think NoMachine had the best performance of those three, but it’s been a hot minute since I’ve personally used it. XRDP is the one I’ve used the most often, but getting login/lock/unlock working was fiddly at first but seems to be stable holding.
Jumping from the “basic connection, maybe barely but not always suitable for video” to “ultra high grade high speed”, we have Parsec and Sunshine+Moonlight. Parsec is currently limited to only Windows/Mac hosting (with Linux client available), and both Parsec and Sunshine require or recommend a reasonable GPU to handle the encoding stage (although I believe Sunshine may support an X264 encoder which may exert a heavy CPU tax depending on your resolution). The specific problem of sourcing a GPU in the cloud (since you mention EC2) becomes the expensive part. This class of remote access tends to fray at high resolution and frame rate less because it’s designed to transport video and games, rather than taking shortcuts to get a minimum desktop visible.
Yeah, I was getting ready to use NoMachine on a recommendation, until I saw the macos uninstall script and the lack of any progress by the development team, going so far as to delete knowledge base articles and promising updates on the next release three versions ago.
An added wrinkle is getting local USB devices visible on a VDI, like say a local thumb drive (in this case it’s a Zoom H5 audio recorder) so I can edit audio, not to mention, getting actual audio across the network, let alone being synchronised.
It’s not trivial :)
At the moment I’m experimenting with a proxmox cluster, but any VM from VMware don’t just run, so for ancient operating systems in a VM like Win98se, you need drivers which are no longer available … odd since that’s precisely why I run it in a VM. Not to mention that the Proxmox UI expects you to run a series of commands in the console every time you want to add a drive, something which happens fairly often.
For shits and giggles try finding a way to properly shutdown a cluster without having to write scripts or shut each node down individually.
If you’re trying to do VDI in the cloud, that can get expensive fast on account of the GPU processing needed
Most of the protocols I know of the run CPU-only (and I’m perfectly happy to be proven wrong and introduced to something new) tend to fray at high latency or high resolution. The usual top two I’ve seen are VNC and RDP (XRDP project on Linux), with NoMachine and plain x11 over SSH being right behind that. I think NoMachine had the best performance of those three, but it’s been a hot minute since I’ve personally used it. XRDP is the one I’ve used the most often, but getting login/lock/unlock working was fiddly at first but seems to be stable holding.
Jumping from the “basic connection, maybe barely but not always suitable for video” to “ultra high grade high speed”, we have Parsec and Sunshine+Moonlight. Parsec is currently limited to only Windows/Mac hosting (with Linux client available), and both Parsec and Sunshine require or recommend a reasonable GPU to handle the encoding stage (although I believe Sunshine may support an X264 encoder which may exert a heavy CPU tax depending on your resolution). The specific problem of sourcing a GPU in the cloud (since you mention EC2) becomes the expensive part. This class of remote access tends to fray at high resolution and frame rate less because it’s designed to transport video and games, rather than taking shortcuts to get a minimum desktop visible.
Yeah, I was getting ready to use NoMachine on a recommendation, until I saw the macos uninstall script and the lack of any progress by the development team, going so far as to delete knowledge base articles and promising updates on the next release three versions ago.
An added wrinkle is getting local USB devices visible on a VDI, like say a local thumb drive (in this case it’s a Zoom H5 audio recorder) so I can edit audio, not to mention, getting actual audio across the network, let alone being synchronised.
It’s not trivial :)
At the moment I’m experimenting with a proxmox cluster, but any VM from VMware don’t just run, so for ancient operating systems in a VM like Win98se, you need drivers which are no longer available … odd since that’s precisely why I run it in a VM. Not to mention that the Proxmox UI expects you to run a series of commands in the console every time you want to add a drive, something which happens fairly often.
For shits and giggles try finding a way to properly shutdown a cluster without having to write scripts or shut each node down individually.
As I said, not trivial :)