Inventor on a Virtual Computer

[rjezuit]

Our IT manager believes that CAD (Inventor) can be run just as well on a virtual machine (little black box) as it can  on a desktop system with sufficient power. The virtual machine is a keyboard, mouse and  monitor along with a little black box that connects you to the virtual server. Anyone have any experience with this or thoughts? Thanks

[stephengibson76]

breaks the EULA

[rjezuit]

We have multiple site/corporate licenses and probably the ability to get ADSK to create some sort of licensing that can make this work. I am looking at is it technically feasible.

[stephengibson76]

perfectly workable, although it also breaks the EUALA remote desktop windows 7 on a decent internet connection is ok, windows 8 remote desktop even better, virtulaization over a reasnable network, you wont notice the difference from the real thing

[rjezuit]

I wonder how they get around the graphics limitation. How do you put a powerful graphics card in a little black box?

[blair]

Possibly you CAD manager may want to look at Fusion360. It's cloud based and will run a a iPad is need be. All your files will be Cloud based as well though.

[TravisNave]

360 is a good choice indeed.  Otherwise, to stay within the EULA as stated above, you might consider Citrix and network licensing.  That would be appropriate.

[LT.Rusty]

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@rjezuit wrote:

Our IT manager believes that CAD (Inventor) can be run just as well on a virtual machine (little black box) as it can  on a desktop system with sufficient power. The virtual machine is a keyboard, mouse and  monitor along with a little black box that connects you to the virtual server. Anyone have any experience with this or thoughts? Thanks

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There's at least one company out there that's offering this service.  They're using VMWare to do it, and you can either use client software or buy a zero client from them.  Your work will be housed on their servers, and you will access it remotely.

I'm not going to name the company, and I'm not going to give hints or clues, but I'll just tell you right now that the service was absolutely terrible.  Really, truly, completely awful.

We had several demo machines to work with.  There were at least two that were virtual machines, and at least two that were dedicated workstations.  The virtual machines were completely unusable for anything more than spreadsheets and MS Word, and even then the lag (their server is about 2000 miles away from my location) made it so that I could easily type 8-10 words ahead of what showed on the screen.  The dedicated workstations were better than the virtual machines, but still terrible.  I compare it to driving a Formula 1 car with a 3-second lag for all visual and control inputs.

The vendor was also projecting that we would need - minimum - a T1 at each desk, whether it was the sales guys using Excel or the engineers using Inventor.  Because we have, right now, a dual T1 line for our facility, this would entail adding 40 or 50 T1's. 

One of the big selling points of the service is that you can work outside of the office.  This was found to be completely not the case.  I personally field-tested the service from 4 different hotels, 8 different Starbucks, and 4 different airports.  It was absolutely unusable at any of those locations.

In short, It may be a great idea, but it's NOT one that's really workable at the present time.

[mslosar]

I'd say it's also heavily dependant on how many machines they want to run virtually. If you're trying to get an small office group of 10 users to simulateously work on inventor at 10 terminals (i.e. 10 open sessions), that's going to have to be one helluva server to allocate full inventor resources for 10 sessions. God forbid everyone hit refresh at once 🙂

For once machine, it probably would be fine. More than that, i'd think your returns would diminish exponentially.

The other issue as brought up is the video card. Inventor requires a good to great card in order to function smoothly (depening on your assembly size/complexity). Not sure how a server is going to accelerate 10 or more screens simultaneously and send constantly updating 1920x1200 (or larger) screens to multiple machines without hammering your network either. I suppose it's possible on a fixed system, but thats still a lot of bandwidth getting sucked down to have everyone rotate objects at once.

[tmchenry]

Caveat:  I'm not an expert in the virtualization field, but my wife works for one of the leading companies, so I have picked up a bit by osmosis.  The graphics card problem seems to be addressed by handling the graphics processing on the server, then encoding the transmitted data using a variety of different protocols and data compression algorithms, dynamically optimized in real time.  Bottom line:  the hardware at the user end does not need to have high-end graphics capability.

[blair]

The high-end graphics has to be somewhere, it's bad enough running IV on a workstation with high end graphics for a single user. As a previous post, it would have to be one "mother" of a server to handle graphics for a number of users.

Let alone any compression for distribution on the network.

[tmchenry]

"As a previous post, it would have to be one "mother" of a server to handle graphics for a number of users."

It sounds like you're conceiving of graphics management as an additive set of tasks, but I doubt that it is.  I'm sure that if you tracked the operations of a single graphics card of a single CAD user you would find that it's extrememly peaky.  That means that one card is probably capable of handling the requirements of quite a few users with no discernable loss in performance.

But, yes, in general I expect that you do need pretty good servers to run a virtualization environment.

[rjezuit]

I have a descent mid range graphics card in my system with a gig of DDR RAM, and it is still the bottleneck in my system.

[blair]

Maybe for some users working on single parts or very small assemblies. Throw in some rendering that can take 30 minutes along with FEA that can take over 30 minutes. Everyone else gets an extended coffee break. I bring my system to it's knees almost every day.

[LT.Rusty]

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@Blair wrote:

Maybe for some users working on single parts or very small assemblies. Throw in some rendering that can take 30 minutes along with FEA that can take over 30 minutes. Everyone else gets an extended coffee break. I bring my system to it's knees almost every day.

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When we did our evaluation, the virtual machines were utter crap.  They were completely unusable on a machine level, rather than just being a connectivity issue.  We had to get dedicated individual machines.  Once we had access to a dedicated 6-core Xeon with a 2GB graphics card the machine performance was resolved, but we still had massive lag due to a 4,000 mile trip from my keyboard / mouse / spacepilot to the workstation and back to my monitor.  It was just terrible.