This article is in progress. The purpose is to identify and compare preconfigured cloud hosted virtualized development, testing, training, and demonstration hosting providers.
Features - Preconfigured Servers (ex: Preloaded SharePoint Server)
- Licenses Included
- BYOL (Bring your own licenses)
- Automatic suspend and resume
- Clone VMs
- Snapshots
- VM Sharing (transfer your VM to a team member's account)
- Export VM (for use locally)
- Public IP or URL
- VPN Tunnel
- Scalability
Pricing Considerations - Simultaneous users
- Processing or Usage time
- CPUs
- Bandwidth
- Per VM
- Disk usage
- RAM
- 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.
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