Hello everyone! How nice of you to read this!
I'm a visual effects artist and I was able to build quite a cool render farm scenario for my company. Since we need to rely mostly on Windows
because of the 3D software we use (3Ds Max and Vray) I'm ending up with quite high operating costs JUST for Windows.
It's actually ridiculously much, if you check out this
Calculation you can see why (metaphorically speaking) the kitty is crying.
Since I don't need 99.9% of the features that Windows Server provides, a simple windows 7 or 10 would be more than sufficient.
Unfortunately, GCE does not support Windows 7 or 10. So my first question is: Will it at some point in the future support a "regular" Windows?
The next thing I tried was running a Debian instance with Virtualbox in order to virtualise a "regular" Windows environment (bulk license is about 18$ a piece)
but I found out that VT-X is not supported by GCE entirely and now I'm stuck with high pricing for Windows server.
So here are my questions in order again:
1.) Will GCE in the future support "regular" Windows images on Instances
2.) Will GCE in the future support VT-X? I found an old thread about it but are there any news about it?
If you have any completely different approach on how to make this work (except switching 3D Software of course) I'm open to all kinds of suggestions!
Thanks!
-Robert Freitag