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cirruslabs / orchard

Orchestrator for running Tart Virtual Machines on a cluster of Apple Silicon devices
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Remote VM access from non-macOS machine #214

Closed pthexton closed 3 weeks ago

pthexton commented 3 weeks ago

Hey all,

Not sure if this is the right place for this question. We're currently investigating what options are available to us to deprecate our previous Intel based infrastructure that we use for centralised VM management to do integration testing of our product.

Orchard looks like it would be a good fit for us on Apple Silicon architecture but the one requirement I have that I can't quite see a concrete answer to is that we have some teams who need access to mac VMs for testing our software integrates with their cloud services, but who themselves work on Windows environments. Is there a cli client for Windows or otherwise a way of getting VNC access details for a started macOS VM that can be used with a generic VNC viewer app?

fkorotkov commented 3 weeks ago

Hi @pthexton,

Yes, it should be possible. Building Windows binaries in #215 which will allow Windows users to start port forwarding and then use any VNC client to connect to VMs. Will that work for your use case and workflow of the teams?

edigaryev commented 3 weeks ago

Please note, that you might also need to enable the VNC viewers may control screen with password option in the Remote Management settings inside of your VMs for the non-macOS VNC clients to work:

Screenshot 2024-11-02 at 02 52 22

This is less secure than using the default Apple Remote Desktop protocol, so it's not enabled by default, but in case of Orchard, since the connections are forwarded through the TLS, it should be fine.

edigaryev commented 3 weeks ago

Also, it turns out that there exist a Windows software (Remote Desktop Manager by Devolutions) that supports the Apple Remote Desktop protocol:

Screenshot 2024-11-02 111200

It seems that they somehow managed to implement the Apple-specific VNC/RFB extensions, which results in the same snappy experience with cursor and window handling as you'd get when using the Screen Sharing app on macOS.

pthexton commented 2 weeks ago

@fkorotkov @edigaryev hey guys, thanks for the info here, this looks great.

I haven't tried it yet but it does look like you have a solution that would work for us here, thanks! I'll drop the info over to the relevant people who are researching what solution we want to go with.