I write software for Windows. Exclusively for Windows. These days, VMWare Fusion and Parallels Desktop are two very mature virtualization products that allow clients to run virtually any Windows software on the Mac. Right now I have a client reporting an issue under VMWare Fusion 5. It’s an important client, so I’d better support him. My options to reproduce the issue are to buy a Mac Mini, or try out a virtual mac hosting service.
I need the following things
- Xbox Cloud Gaming (xCloud) on iOS What games are available? There are currently over 100 games for players to access, including big hits like Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Gears 5, NieR: Automata, Ori and the Blind Forest, and more. If you subscribe to Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and get EA Play, you'll also be able to play games like The Sims 4, Star.
- The company announced on its blog that iOS and macOS gaming would be as powerful as console games. They also stated that xCloud users would experience faster load times, better frame rates, and a higher-quality experience.
- Microsoft has begun testing its game streaming service, xCloud, on the web via a browser for iOS and iPadOS, and on PC via Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge, The Verge reports. Microsoft's xCloud.
- Root access. I need to install the software I want to test, including VMWare Fusion.
- OS X Mavericks. I need the latest version of the operating system.
Project Xcloud Macos
I’m reviewing these services based on my needs of occasional full speed access for testing. If you’re after a dedicated server for an application like web hosting, you will have different needs than I have.
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Here’s a list of all of the services that I could find offering roughly the kind of service I’m looking for.
Some of these services offer cheaper plans with a more limited feature set (e.g. no root access). I’ve chosen in most cases to review the cheapest plan that offers Mavericks and that offers root access to your VM.
| Service | Notes |
| xcloud xcloud.me | Plans from $85 USD/month (priced in swiss francs). The rolls royce of virtual macs. Does everything, the only downside is that TeamViewer is not preinstalled. |
| Mac Mini Cloud macminicloud.net | Starts at USD $~150/month, which is somewhat sneakily described as a free tier. I didn’t see anything to recommend this over the other services I trialed, so I ruled this out based on the high cost and sneaky pricing. |
| Mac in Cloud macincloud.com | 1 day free trial is “included in each subscription”. Has a “pay as you go plan”, at $30 for 30 hours, which is great for an occasional user like myself. Does not include root access. Sounds good otherwise, but not suited to my needs so I didn’t try it. If you need specific software installed, you need to contact support to get it done. There’s a reasonable amount of positive media floating around about this mob, so I wouldn’t hesitate to try it. |
| vmOSX virtualmacosx.com | Free trial by email application. $40 USD/month for OSX Mavericks and root access. The plan is called Virtual Personal Desktop Advanced. They have cheaper plans for OSX Mountain Lion, and for non-root access. For your $40/month, you get 40gb storage, 1536 MB RAM and 2 virtual CPU cores. Virtual Machines are preconfigured with TeamViewer for remote access.I filled out the email form to request a trial, but at the time of publication they had not responded. There is some positive media floating around. They did however point out that they did not support running VMWare Fusion on their environment. |
| XCodeClub xcodeclub.com | A one man show. For $35/month subscription, or $55 once off for a single month, you get 42gb storage (20gb free after OS install), 2gb RAM, and 2 virtual CPU cores. Daniel very politely offered a 1 hour trial. I was going to take him up on that, but I spent longer than that just getting connected to another service, so I wont bother just now. While I didn’t try it out, xcodeclub is highly spoken of and good value, and I wouldn’t hesitate to use this service. The only downside is the one-man-show aspect. VMs are preconfigured with TeamViewer. |
I had every intention of trying out xcodeclub, vmosx and xcloud. However due to time constraints I ended up testing xcloud only.
xcloud is an offering from innofield who also provide the “Flow App Engine” (flow.ch).
Three plans are offered, all include Mavericks and root access. The cheapest one (“mini”) is 79 CHF, which is USD $~85/month at today’s exchange rates. For that you get 80gb storage, 2gb RAM, and 2 x 2.3GHz CPU cores.
No trial offered, but I asked for a 1 week trial via their contact form anyway. They were happy to oblige. I’ll be trailing a “pro” instance with 160gb storage, 4gb RAM and 4 virtual CPU cores.
From the customer console, I am able to start and stop the virtual instance.
API Capabilities
A support engineer was kind enough to explain some of the capabilities of the snapshot API.
This is just as powerful as AWS or Azure, but it’s for Macs! Brilliant.
This API seems to be undocumented, I expect that this is a work in progress and that we’ll see more of this soon.
Documentation
Xcloud provides excellent documentation for some of the basics. The getting started guide covers every operating system you might consider connecting from. Some of the more common problems you might expect to encounter are well documented.
Connecting to the Instance
I imagine if you’re connecting from a Mac in the first place, this whole thing goes much smoother.
Right from the console, there’s a button to launch an HTML5 VNC client. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get the HTML5 client to work. I tried Chrome, IE and Firefox. I got this error in every case.
I was able to connect just fine with TightVNC, however. My experience was pretty slow, but I attribute this to my own ADSL connection rather than anything to do with xcloud. This was just painfully slow.
To resolve this, the Xcloud documentation suggests installing TeamViewer. So I started an AWS windows instance, RDPd to it, installed TightVNC there, VNCd to the xcloud instance (RDP-to-AWS-to-VNC-to-xcloud is actually reasonably fast), installed TeamViewer, then connected via TeamViewer. Phew! Happily, this all works just fine.
The only improvement to this would be if xcloud installed TeamViewer by default. VNC from Windows is just too slow.
Testing
Mac Os Cloud
Network connection seems more than acceptable. I was able to download a 4gb ISO from MSDN in less than 20 minutes.
I have full root access, so installing VMWare Fusion was not a problem. I couldn’t install 64-bit Windows, but the 32-bit version went in just fine.
The performance of this VM seems to be very good. It has no problem running a VM within a VM. My performance bottleneck is clearly the Internet connection speed to my own office.
Support
Xcloud support were quite responsive, and provided useful and timely answers to all of my questions.
Macos Cloud Desktop
Budget conscious? Xcodeclub might work out for you. But if you want a real killer go with xcloud for a few dollars more. You wont be disappointed.