Greetings, everyone!
I recently came across the concept of virtual commons, which involves utilizing a pre-loaded operating system with all the necessary company software. This virtual environment can be accessed either through VPN or locally within the company.
I had the opportunity to experience this concept at a friend’s college, where they provided access to a virtual machine via remote desktop protocol (RDP). Users were required to log in using their credentials. For further information, you can visit this link: Virtual Commons | IT Services | Seneca Students (senecacollege.ca).
My question to all of you is: Has anyone else worked on a similar setup, either for their own small business or as a home server? I’m interested in learning more about the technology and would like to set up something similar for educational purposes.
Thank you in advance for sharing your insights.
It doesn’t sound like anything special, just setup a virtual environment, I use Proxmox, create your virtual machines, then remote into them. If you are accessing over the internet you’ll need to use a VPN, RDP isn’t secure over the internet but you could technically use it.
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If it is Windows, licensing the VMs is going to be a pain!
A government job my wife had, they had a way to do something similar from home.
They used Cisco VPN, this spawned a Windows Server VM that had all their tools configured and logged them into the VM with their access credentials (smart card and password). I think they needed their smart card to even get the VPN to form.
Reason they used Windows Server? Each Datacenter license you bought allowed 5 VMs under that same product key, and at the time Server was the only OS that was allowed to be a VM. Now you can at least buy win10 and win11 VM licenses, but Datacenter still offers those free instances (if memory is correct).
I’m afraid that the details of how it was done are not something I know. it could have just pulled a preconfigured .wim image, or it might have built it from the ADK kit on the fly. They spawned quickly so I’m guessing they were made from a .wim image.
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Yeah but the way they have designed, fascinated me.
Good to know. I am looking to do something same like this.