I agree with others saying you might only need one computer. $2500 buys you mostly newer stuff, except maybe the GPUs. But one machine saves a lot of headaches. You’d go with multiple machines if you wanted some high availability or redundancy but you’d need to set that all up (plus a single failure is a single failure). Plus if you go with windows, you’d need multiple licenses (which is no big deal, maybe $20 a pop).

In this case, Id say it’s best to stay away from hypervisors being a small business since you don’t want to devote a lot of time maintaining your system; and instead of running a complicated storage setup use a a mix of fast NVMe drives and large 5 year warranty drives and a separate NAS located elsewhere in your home (or even better, pay for a cloud based backup solution) that does INCREMENTAL backups once a month, once a week, and once a day. That saves on how much bandwidth you use but has enough backups where a daily oopsie can be reversed and you have an old enough backup to shrug off a ransome ware attack (once you delete everything and implement a more hardened setup). If you already pay for Microsoft office, you have 1 TB OneDrive storage that you can use as a free option, depending on how big your critical files are.

Sounds like you have windows but it’s also dependent on what your software requires (access to opengl, access to GPU, etc.) that might make sharing the one computer much more complicated. Assuming it’s simple (GPU and opengl acceleration) RDP is a good choice, it’s sturdy and built in and doesn’t require any command like stuff. Note that windows pro only allows 1 user to be logged in at a time, you’ll need to use something called rdpwrap to defeat that. Conversely you can pay a lot of money for windows server and have that unlocked - at that point, I’d look at running Ubuntu.

5he other part of the conversation is how they will remote into your home. I highly recommend setting up a tunnel and only giving them access to their computers. The easiest way to do this is to buy a router with a tailscale client built in, put all the computers they need behind that router, and then have them install tailscale on their own computers. When you are done with the intern, you can easily revoke they access through the tailscale web portal.

Lastly, your Internet provider needs to be up to snuff. I would say 100 mbit up is reasonable of all five people are going to be in there at the same time. That translates to 80 mbit actual performance, 20 for your household use, and 60/5 = 15 mbit for their rdp which is more than enough. I have 10 mbit up in one of my locations and it sucks.

There are tons of other, more complicated and more expensive/cheaper ways to do this.

If you want 5 pc’s to be able to be accessed remotely, rdp is definitely usable. I use it to access my home pc from work.

I have a netgear Orbi mesh network for my home (would have gone with other networking hardware knowing what I know now), but it has a built in vpn server.

You could get a router that supports vpn, and then set up access controls for the rdp protocols on each desktop, and give your interns the vpn configuration information needed so they can vpn into the network and rdp the machines “locally” without opening up the rdp port to the internet. Just make sure you segregate those computers from the rest of your personal network, the parts you wouldn’t want anybody to have access to.

Depending on the software you’re using, it might make more sense to set up a hyper visor type system, where you have one machine powerful enough to run 5 virtual machines, and then you can grant access a few different ways.

Either way, if this is big money, it might be worth it to hire a consultant to help point you in the right direction with what you even need to learn.

So… Your issue isn’t going to be getting them what they need. Your issue is gonna be need High Availability and scalability. To give them info, you can create a VPN, or some sort of tunneling service. You can migrate to a cloud service such as azure, AWS, or Google cloud.

Scalability means that if your business expands, it’ll be easy for you to expand computing resources, without the need for redesign (this gets expensive). Also you don’t want to be stuck paying for services you don’t use. No sense buying a $1k server, if a $200 server does the job. But that $200 server might not be enough next week.

High Availability means, if the server your instance is on goes down, it will automatically populate on a different server, so your employees/interns never lose connectivity.

Once you decide that platform, you need someone who will administrate users and privileges, backups, basic IT support to those in the field.

This is typically what a MSP handles for businesses. Designing, the system, and the way the system is maintained is why ppl get paid the big bucks.

This is why, most businesses hire a IT professional to do this. They should know, saas, paas & iaas. Know which one is right for you, help you decide which cloud platform you go with, and which security measures you go with.

Now you’ll likely find a solution that works on this subreddit, you’ll likely find cheap solutions, overly expensive solutions, and secure and insecure solutions, and everything in between. I’d be looking to either hire a system administrator, or a MSP to set this up right from the getgo. If you feel you are up to that task, by all means. But, as someone who ran a business, and is now looking to get into this exact field. This is a full time job you are giving yourself.