Accessing MAC VMs over Cloud

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Level 1

8 points

Accessing MAC VMs over Cloud

Hello,

We are a learning and development unit of an organization and one of our training program is on iOS Development. During the course of the training we would want our participants to try our their coding on the MAC environment. This includes develop iOS code, compile, debug and execution. We would like to host a set of MAC VMs over a cloud. What we would like to know is, is this allowed as per the EULA? Can we buy licenses for a set of MAC VMs and host it over the cloud and reuse these MAC VMs across various batches or participants OR do we need to go by procuring 1 VM to participant. The MAC VMs we buy would be hosted over a private could provided by a 3rd party vendor with whom we have a strategic partnership on providing other types of VMs like Windows/Linux/UNIX. Can someone please guide us on how to get an answer to this question? We don't own any Apple Mac right now and hence we are not able to leverage Apple's online support chat feature. Thanks in advance for your help.

Regards

Narayanan

iMac, iOS 9.3.3

Posted on Aug 5, 2016 2:40 AM

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Answer 1

dialabrain

Level 10

136,349 points

Aug 5, 2016 3:11 AM in response to narayankv

FWIW, You cannot legally run Apple software on non-Apple hardware.

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Answer 2

narayankv Author

Level 1

8 points

Aug 5, 2016 3:45 AM in response to dialabrain

Thanks much but the vendor we are in touch with will host iOS only on MAC machines. We will be connecting to those machines virtually.

1. We connect to the vendor VMs through our Windows Desktops.

2. From those windows virtual machines we will connect to MAC machines virtually.

We were told by the vendor that earlier Apple had an explicit licensing clause that 1 MAC VM can be assigned 1 dedicate user and the same cannot be used by another. We cannot buy X number for MAC VMs as we are limited by budget but our intention is to buy MAC VMs for a batch and later assign the same set of VMs to other batches as well.

Sorry if I am not making it clear. I am pasting the text that was given to us by our vendor.

" We realize that the only available option we have is to procure Mac devices on your company's behalf and host them for your use. It would be your private data center hosting and managed by us for Mac devices. While that is allowed by Apple, we would have to virtualize the access to the Mac devices so that we could automatically clean them after each user. Meaning, the course participants would login to a virtualized version of the OS on the physical Mac device and that's allowed as well. Further, one participant would access any given device at a time and that's allowed as well. The question then comes up - are different participants of various course batches allowed to access a given device at different times for the purpose of training on Xcode?"

Can you please help me explaining this scenario and if this is allowed by Apply EULA?

Thanks.

Narayanan

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Answer 3

dialabrain

Level 10

136,349 points

Aug 5, 2016 3:57 AM in response to narayankv

The SLA states you can run one VM per Mac. So if you wanted to run 10 Mac VMs you would have to purchase !0 Macs. I think that is what the vendor is saying as well. But you should really get clarification from your vendor.

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