I haven’t seen this recommended anywhere but you could get a beefier computer, slap on windows server and use Remote Desktop session host that will allow multiple users to connect. You can get a 5 user license for about $250 from a quick google search. You can enable gpu rendering for rdp but if that does not work you can get a slightly older version of windows server and use remote fx. Pair that with a vpn server install and now everything will be in one place.

Sounds to me like your in way over your head and need to find a good geek in your local area. Setting this up is just one challenge but management and running this long term is going to be more challenging. Are you ready to stop your every day business processes to manage this, deal with user issues? By the questions you’re asking, i.e simple file sharing between systems, your going to leave your employees, company and customer data vulnerable trying to learn this on the fly.
I guess my question to you would be, you need an appendectomy, Reddit users in a Doctor forum say its easy to do, just mark area to cut, clean area, make incision and clamp off intestine, remove appendix, suture wound and bandage. Sure you saved money, more impressive you did it yourself, over the next 2 weeks you have to prevent infection. Are you going to try it?

Use azure avd or aws workspaces.

Mechdyne TGX is made for exactly this - it works beautifully. I ran across it while finding options for remote video editing during Covid, and we had spectacular success with it (major sports TV network). It’s significantly more bandwidth efficient than the competition, which was critical for us due to limited vpn bandwidth at the time.

If self hosting, I’d virtualize the workstations and utilize GPUs designed for virtualized engineering workstations, like a Nvidia A100

As for access, you could go through the trouble and expense of exposing something like VMware Horizon VDI to the internet through a reverse proxy if using virtualized workstations.

A better option would be to go with Cloudflare Zero Trust. You run a small agent on your side, and people outside needing access sign in through Cloudflare, and you can grant very specific access to what they need. It’s kind of like a VPN but with much greater control over where someone can go while connected

You’ll want to segment the workstations off into their own VLAN, and you should be using a good firewall on its own hardware to lock down access between outside and the workstation VLAN (ie only allow connection from Cloudflare service endpoint urls to IP range of your workstations)

There are two ways to approach this: For $500 a pop you can build a pretty decent desktop with current hardware with warranties for that piece of mind. Or, you can head on to eBay and get something like R730 server for $600-$700 with dual 20 core CPUs and decent amount of RAM. Use Free versions of Citrix Hypervisor or XCP-NG as your OS and deploy as many Windows VMs as you need. Then setup snapshot schedule for each vm for backups, configure RDP, and off you go.

I agree with others saying you might only need one computer. $2500 buys you mostly newer stuff, except maybe the GPUs. But one machine saves a lot of headaches. You’d go with multiple machines if you wanted some high availability or redundancy but you’d need to set that all up (plus a single failure is a single failure). Plus if you go with windows, you’d need multiple licenses (which is no big deal, maybe $20 a pop).

In this case, Id say it’s best to stay away from hypervisors being a small business since you don’t want to devote a lot of time maintaining your system; and instead of running a complicated storage setup use a a mix of fast NVMe drives and large 5 year warranty drives and a separate NAS located elsewhere in your home (or even better, pay for a cloud based backup solution) that does INCREMENTAL backups once a month, once a week, and once a day. That saves on how much bandwidth you use but has enough backups where a daily oopsie can be reversed and you have an old enough backup to shrug off a ransome ware attack (once you delete everything and implement a more hardened setup). If you already pay for Microsoft office, you have 1 TB OneDrive storage that you can use as a free option, depending on how big your critical files are.

Sounds like you have windows but it’s also dependent on what your software requires (access to opengl, access to GPU, etc.) that might make sharing the one computer much more complicated. Assuming it’s simple (GPU and opengl acceleration) RDP is a good choice, it’s sturdy and built in and doesn’t require any command like stuff. Note that windows pro only allows 1 user to be logged in at a time, you’ll need to use something called rdpwrap to defeat that. Conversely you can pay a lot of money for windows server and have that unlocked - at that point, I’d look at running Ubuntu.

5he other part of the conversation is how they will remote into your home. I highly recommend setting up a tunnel and only giving them access to their computers. The easiest way to do this is to buy a router with a tailscale client built in, put all the computers they need behind that router, and then have them install tailscale on their own computers. When you are done with the intern, you can easily revoke they access through the tailscale web portal.

Lastly, your Internet provider needs to be up to snuff. I would say 100 mbit up is reasonable of all five people are going to be in there at the same time. That translates to 80 mbit actual performance, 20 for your household use, and 60/5 = 15 mbit for their rdp which is more than enough. I have 10 mbit up in one of my locations and it sucks.

There are tons of other, more complicated and more expensive/cheaper ways to do this.

If you want 5 pc’s to be able to be accessed remotely, rdp is definitely usable. I use it to access my home pc from work.

I have a netgear Orbi mesh network for my home (would have gone with other networking hardware knowing what I know now), but it has a built in vpn server.

You could get a router that supports vpn, and then set up access controls for the rdp protocols on each desktop, and give your interns the vpn configuration information needed so they can vpn into the network and rdp the machines “locally” without opening up the rdp port to the internet. Just make sure you segregate those computers from the rest of your personal network, the parts you wouldn’t want anybody to have access to.

Depending on the software you’re using, it might make more sense to set up a hyper visor type system, where you have one machine powerful enough to run 5 virtual machines, and then you can grant access a few different ways.

Either way, if this is big money, it might be worth it to hire a consultant to help point you in the right direction with what you even need to learn.

If they need tow work with 3D accelerated software, best not use RDP. Go for Parsec or similar. Parsec is free with paid plans for multiple monitors and more. It has been solid for gaming over internet when I travel with my laptop and is being used by teams at LTT for video editing.

So… Your issue isn’t going to be getting them what they need. Your issue is gonna be need High Availability and scalability. To give them info, you can create a VPN, or some sort of tunneling service. You can migrate to a cloud service such as azure, AWS, or Google cloud.

Scalability means that if your business expands, it’ll be easy for you to expand computing resources, without the need for redesign (this gets expensive). Also you don’t want to be stuck paying for services you don’t use. No sense buying a $1k server, if a $200 server does the job. But that $200 server might not be enough next week.

High Availability means, if the server your instance is on goes down, it will automatically populate on a different server, so your employees/interns never lose connectivity.

Once you decide that platform, you need someone who will administrate users and privileges, backups, basic IT support to those in the field.

This is typically what a MSP handles for businesses. Designing, the system, and the way the system is maintained is why ppl get paid the big bucks.

This is why, most businesses hire a IT professional to do this. They should know, saas, paas & iaas. Know which one is right for you, help you decide which cloud platform you go with, and which security measures you go with.

Now you’ll likely find a solution that works on this subreddit, you’ll likely find cheap solutions, overly expensive solutions, and secure and insecure solutions, and everything in between. I’d be looking to either hire a system administrator, or a MSP to set this up right from the getgo. If you feel you are up to that task, by all means. But, as someone who ran a business, and is now looking to get into this exact field. This is a full time job you are giving yourself.

Pfsense for a free firewall/vpn. Have 3 ports on it (WAN,LAN,VPN Network). Buy a cheap (1gb link speed) switch to facilitate multiple computers, and plug the remote access computers to the vpn network.

This keeps them off of your internal home network from a threat perspective. And can be had for about $100-250 for the setup. Beyond that, you can proceed with whatever design you want, and leverage RDP access.

Many others have better solutions, but this is another way to go about it.

A distributed file system would be a nice addition. Ceph, gluster…

zero trust platform . there are many vpn alternatives with easy to setup archetecture.

You could set up quacamole Apache to manage the rdp connections. Through up an authentik instance for authentication to guacamole.