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I need your advice on the following problem:

  1. My client uses a Web app which has ActiveX dependencies so it can only be accessed through Windows.

  2. However, he would like to access it through an iPad.

It seems to me that the only solution is to create a virtual machine running Windows, which the iPad accesses and through that machine I can access the Web app through IE.

I'm been researching and it seems that the best option is to setup a VMware View environment with VMware View Connection Server on the host machine and VMware View Client on the iPad.

Am I correct so far?

The biggest problem is that the solution I'll have to come up with, will have to scale as well. For instance, to have around 100 iPads accessing multiple servers each running multiple Windows virtual machines.

I know this can quickly become quite expensive. Am I in the right direction? As an alternative, does anyone know any cloud based companies that already provide this kind of service?

Thank you for your help.

Pedro
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  • Better to pay developer to make ipad version of the website. – Andrew Smith Jul 04 '12 at 11:11
  • This would be ideal, yes. Unfortunately, it is not viable at all. The app is extremely complex; it has been in production for many years and it cost a small fortune to develop. – Pedro Jul 04 '12 at 12:08

1 Answers1

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I would look into setting up an RDS server to stream IE to RDP clients (and I know there are RDP clients for iPad). Definitely will be cheaper than running a VDI system, since all you'll need is a single RDS host and a bunch of CALs, instead of serious hardware and storage, and VMWare licenses besides Windows desktop licenses that cost more than RDS CALs. And RDS can scale into a farm of course.

AFAIK there are similar solutions for application virtualization from other vendors, however, I'm not sure those have iPad based clients.

dyasny
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