Cloud Hosted Dev, Test, Training, and Demo environments

This article is in progress.  The purpose is to identify and compare preconfigured cloud hosted virtualized development, testing, training, and demonstration hosting providers.

Features

1. Preconfigured Servers (ex: Preloaded SharePoint Server)
1. Licenses Included
2. BYOL (Bring your own licenses)
2. Automatic suspend and resume
3. Clone VMs
4. Snapshots
5. VM Sharing (transfer your VM to a team member's account)
6. Export VM (for use locally)
7. Public IP or URL
8. VPN Tunnel
9. Scalability

Pricing Considerations

1. Simultaneous users
2. Processing or Usage time
3. CPUs
4. Bandwidth
5. Per VM
6. Disk usage
7. RAM
8. Public IP or URL

Hosting Providers

• CloudShare
• ProPlus (8GB RAM, 300GB Disk for $60/month)
• Features: 1.1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6?, 7*
• 6?: More difficult to request this since the licenses are included
• 7*: Public URL redirector.  Unreliable in my experience.  May not work if the machine was auto-suspended.
• Performance: Lackluster.  Takes 5 to 10 seconds to load some standard pages.  Can be time consuming to wait for servers to resume from suspend (3-4 times per day).  Limited CPU allocation.
• Skytap
• Features: 1.2*, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9
• 1.2*: These templates are not provisioned as well as CloudShare.  Recommend bringing your own VM as well as licenses.
• Performance: Untested.

Other Articles:

• http://sharepointwookiee.com/?p=245