New Development Hardware Setup Help

[AndyR]

Hey,

We are a software development company and in house run a mix of Windows/Linux. We've now been asked by our parent company to start developing our app onto Mac OSX and iOS so I need some help on this.

We have no Mac Hardware here to start with. We run all our development environment VMs on ESXi, but this doesn't support OSX VMs without Apple SANs so thats out. Ideally I'd like something central that can provide developers with access to a Mac desktop to test/dev on but I can't see anything like an OSX Terminal Server.

Any ideas where to start? Would I be good to start with say a couple of Mac Mini Servers and then run VMware Fusion with several Mountain Lion VM's and then Screen Share these? Then the devs can access via VNC? Sounds messy to me so looking for suggestions please?

Thanks,

Andy

 

[Bobby.e]

I don't know anything about this. I only did a google search but here you go: http://www.aquaconnect.net/mac-terminal-server.php

 

[AndyR]

I don't know anything about this. I only did a google search but here you go: http://www.aquaconnect.net/mac-terminal-server.php

Thanks yeah I saw that. Didn't like it as was a 3rd party add-on to get it working in a way the OS wasn't meant for so not really ideal for developing products on. Would be nice if Apple could have built something like this into OSX Server though.

 

[freejazz-man]

Yes, I'm sure apple is interested in providing a product that makes it so you don't have to buy a mac in order to run OSX

 

[AndyR]

Yes, I'm sure apple is interested in providing a product that makes it so you don't have to buy a mac in order to run OSX

Read the original post again! I never said I want a way to run OSX without Apple Hardware, I was asking for a way to provide multi user access to single hardware to reduce the amount of hardware purchased, the same exact way every virtualization software works. Apple support this with XServes on VMWare but they don't sell the XServes anymore else this would be my first point of call.

I'll happily buy Minis, what I was looking for was to find if there was a way to reduce the amount of Mini's or other Mac's I'd need to buy in order to get more use out of them, ala Terminal Services, Remote Desktop, Virtualization.

Jeez,this is why I came to Macrumors last with this question,way to many judgemental people who just want to slag first, then read second.

 

[AndyR]

Well this is messed up. There were 4 really helpful responses but they have now all vanished! Guess it was the jelous ones posting stupid comments who got it reported as it made them feel small.

I'm outta here, going to go use a more professional forum as this is hopeless here now.

MODS - Feel free to close or remove the thread as its pointless.

 

[ChristianVirtual]

You could also look into TeamViewer for single CPUs
And instead a big bunch of Minis maybe a mix of Minis and Mac Pro (the bigger one; will deal better with more virtual machines)
Depends on how much money you get to invest.

 

[JonyHolt]

There is not a native mac terminal option. What you can do is what we do with some of our clients. Utilize the server as the user's location and have your users use older mac hardware. This way they can share screen and login as their own user.

 

[freejazz-man]

Read the original post again! I never said I want a way to run OSX without Apple Hardware, I was asking for a way to provide multi user access to single hardware to reduce the amount of hardware purchased, the same exact way every virtualization software works. Apple support this with XServes on VMWare but they don't sell the XServes anymore else this would be my first point of call.

I'll happily buy Minis, what I was looking for was to find if there was a way to reduce the amount of Mini's or other Mac's I'd need to buy in order to get more use out of them, ala Terminal Services, Remote Desktop, Virtualization.

Jeez,this is why I came to Macrumors last with this question,way to many judgemental people who just want to slag first, then read second.

I'm well aware of what you are looking for, and the answer is that apple is not interested in providing an application that would make you not have to buy as much hardware to support the amount of software you intend to.