Civil 3D and Infrastructure Design suite in a virtual machine

[Anonymous]

Hello folks,

I am looking for anyone that uses Civil 3D or Infrastructure Design Suite remotely on a virtual machine.  I have heard that some users have Revit running in a virtual environment and access projects remotely but I haven't seen anything posted with Civil 3D or IDS.  We are updating our servers and have a consultant that thinks this is a viable solution.  He is proposing we move all of our data to a single location and have our remote locations access the data via a virtual machine on a virtual server.  Since he proposed the solution not knowing anything about AutoCAD civil 3D or IDS and with little knowledge of the complexity of our drawings, I am a bit skeptical that it will work.  He referenced a solution posted by NVIDIA that claims to work with RevIT.  I am reaching out to the firm in the NVIDIA article but the fact that it is Revit and not Civil 3D or IDS ultimate, makes me think we may have additional issues.

http://www.nvidia.com/object/enterprise-virtualization-case-study-tsp.html

Any information would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

[Civil3DReminders_com]

One of the main issues will be latency between locations. If either location has a bad internet connection it won't be a nice experience. The more people you put on the virtual machines the slower it will go, since the bandwidth will be taken up by all of those people. What happens when the internet goes down? No you've taken all of the office off line costing your firm thousands of dollars in lost revenue and costs related to the outage that compound the problem.

I haven't run Civil 3D through a virtual machine, but I have done it for Visual Studio. I wouldn't say it's a great experience. Sure it works, but the latency starts to get old after about 30 minutes.

[Anonymous]

Thank you... I know it's a bad idea but the more posts I receive telling me it's a bad idea the better.

[brianchapmandesign]

I've used https://greencloudvps.com/ for testing and it works just fine.  A little latency, but even a little is enough that I couldn't put up with it for production personally.

Interesting idea though...I see a ton of ups and downs.  We sync between offices in different states and it creates enough of it's own problems with Civil 3d; I can't imagine dropping an army of VPNs into the mix.

[Anonymous]

Thanks Brian,

I am certain our users would not be ok with the latency either... we currently use DFS replication between sites to get our files pushed out to all sites.  I've looked at Panzura too... I'd like keep things the way they are... it's working well.

Kathy

[Anonymous]

How do you sync between offices?  DFS Replication?

[andrewpuller3811]

I use Infrastructure Design Suite Premium in a virtual machine on our server for deployment testing.

I don't notice any latency for autocad/civil 3d etc., but I am connected over our 1Gb/s lan. I would not want to try it over slower networks though.

In the virtual machine, infraworks and recap do not run due to the lack of a compatible graphics card.

I don't know if this can be overcome with emulation or not.