I am looking to run a windows 10/11 instance in the cloud (VTI) and signed up for the new Microsoft 365 PC service. It’s pretty easy to setup and I was excited that now I could have a nice windows box in the cloud that I could access from a MBP or iPad without physically owning a pc or messing about with my MPB.
The big gotcha is the custom software program that I need to run crashed and it turns out that MS 365 PC doesn’t have a real GPU! The software doesn’t need a massive card but just a modern-ish GPU the developer told me. I believe v2 cloud has a GPU option but you have to install windows first - there must be a VTI provider that has both a pre installed windows instance AND a GPU?
So in short of heading to costco and buying an windows 11 laptop what other VIT providers do folks know that have a real CPU and run Windows 10/11 (Azure won’t work I think)
Also not intereste in Bootcamp, parallels or VM fusion. Boot camp sucks (M1 is a no go too) as it’s either windows or osx not both and the programs crashes on the other two.
Ok so not a lot of feedback. I did setup V2Cloud, an alternative that uses windows 10 but the GPU options are a $50 add on so $90 a month for a windows machine in the cloud is a little high in my opinion but for the month it’s needs probably better than lugging around an extra laptop while out in the field. V2Cloud setup was a breeze and I was up within 1/2 and hour. One does need a 365 license that I have yet to provide them and you get a 10 day free trial something that Microsoft does not offer.
Another option (don’t know if it would be better or wose) is to use an AWS EC2 instance as your cloud VM.
EC2 is an Amazon Web Service for “Elastic Compute Cloud” - a way to host a virtual computer on the AWS cloud network. You can create EC2 instances that run Linux, Windows or macOS.
A Windows instance can be accessed via Microsoft’s Remote Desktop app. See also the getting started guide for Windows-on-EC2.
Pricing varies greatly depending on how your EC2 instance is configured and how much it runs. To keep prices as low as possible, you can configure your instance to not run when you aren’t actively using it - it will be suspended at all other times.
Also, depending on your needs, you may be able to use their free tier, which is 750 hours per month of a “t2.micro” instance (one of the lowest capacity types) for the first year of your account. Unfortunately, the T2 instances don’t include GPUs - for that, you need one of the “Accelerated computing” instance types, which aren’t available on the free tier.
AWS EC2 is a bit of a pain to set up, since it is designed to be used as a component in a larger cloud-based network service, but it does work. I’ve taken a few classes where the instructor created a Linux EC2 instance (accessible via VNC) for each person taking the class (we logged in via our personal laptops). Not too expensive, since they were only used for a week, and definitely cheaper than buying and maintaining a classroom full of PCs.
Amazon WorkSpaces is the AWS service geared toward having a Windows desktop in the cloud and they do have GPU options. It’s a competitor to V2Cloud, which I haven’t heard of before but there are many comparable services. I’m a little surprised the Windows 365 Cloud PC service originally tried didn’t have a “proper” GPU option, I think Microsoft’s Azure Virtual Desktop does.
Windows running on EC2s is more commonly used just for Windows Server by admins who rarely look at the GUI (you can run Windows Server “headless” but many admins don’t know how to do all the management that way and it’s not unusual for 3rd party software to require the GUI).
We bailed on all options, as nothing worked with our program, MS (no GPU) and V2cloud. Probably the way the developer wrote the code and how it uses the GPU. It’s not a CPU / GPU hog so a cloud computer should of worked. Just didn’t have time to investigate more as I was doing this for a pal.
Ended up borrowing an neweish crappy dell laptop to run the program - of course just running down to Costco and picking one up would be another option too - but I was curious about the topic.
- there must be a VTI provider that has both a pre installed windows instance AND a GPU?