Question A Stumper of a Virtual Machine Solution requirement.

[newsurak]

Hi there tech gurus and assorted smart persons.
I am looking for a solution to an interesting problem.
I need a Windows 10 PC at about 100 sites in order to connect vendor specific software to hardware for support and configuration. But the need to connect is rare, so the return on investment of 100 windows machines and licenses is just not worth the cost.
So I'm thinking, distribute cheap old used little Linux terminals on site to remote into (using say Teamviewer or Anydesk) from the shop, and connect from that remote terminal to a persistent virtual Windows desktop instance with the vendor software installed on it. But that virtual instance, when engaged, must be able to see and access theremote terminal's LAN as if the instance was (more or less) natively on the LAN.
Any thoughts on a solution?

 

[TerryLaze]

If these locations have to be legal you will still have to pay for the licenses no matter if they run in virtual or not.
Hardware wise you are not gaining anything either since running windows 10 inside of an virtual machine is even harder then running it natively.

 

[Math Geek]

your talking virtualization which is something i am not familiar with. remote desktop protocol is what i believe you need to be looking at.

will allow someone to "log into" your win 10 machine at HQ, do what they need to do and then sign off. but how to do it is something i don't know. that's the next step in my learning since it is becoming more and more used. if this is a rare occurance it may be simplest to outsource the virtual machine to a 3rd party. AWS and others offer such things and i am pretty sure you can contract it based on frequency of need. may not pay by the log-in but might be rather cheap for a small number of log-ins a month.

 

[newsurak]

If these locations have to be legal you will still have to pay for the licenses no matter if they run in virtual or not.
Hardware wise you are not gaining anything either since running windows 10 inside of an virtual machine is even harder then running it natively.

Thanks for the input. I don't believe there is a legal issue here. Just a technical one. And yeah virtual windows hosted outside is proving to be a LAN problem. Thanks.