Does a cloud service like Azure or EC2 exist which can run arbitrary workloads? (e.g. Client SKUs of Windows)?

The list of Open Virtualization Alliance members may have some candidates for you A seaarch on the page for "operating system" suggests the following possibilities (in addition to the already-mentioned CloudSigma ): ElasticHosts stepping stone GmbH (I'm less sure about this one) Sublime IP.

The list of Open Virtualization Alliance members may have some candidates for you. A seaarch on the page for "operating system" suggests the following possibilities (in addition to the already-mentioned CloudSigma): ElasticHosts stepping stone GmbH (I'm less sure about this one) Sublime IP.

Buy time on an EC2 instance and use it to host VirtualBox VMs with VMs set up for each operating system you want to test for. Use a RDP client or VNC or some other means to control the guest OS. This forum post seems to point to that being possible.

But yes it is not a cloud service itself and you would have todo some initial setup and configuration work yourself.

Running your own server is not a cloud service. (Which defeats the whole point of this which is that I don't want to buy a separate piece of hardware for something I don't do too often) – Billy ONeal Sep 24 at 1:22 I meant buy time on an ec2 instance and run virtualbox on it. I know I didn't explain that very well.

– Shane Wealti Sep 24 at 3:52 You can't run a hypervisor inside of a hypervisor. – Billy ONeal Sep 24 at 4:02 I havent done it myself and you might be right about that but the forum post I linked to claims that it is possible and explains how to set it up. – Shane Wealti Sep 24 at 4:05 You can run VirtualBox inside of EC2, because VirtualBox supports running without a true hypervisor.

The problem is, it's extremely slow to do so. Slow to the point of being impractical. (Pure software virtualizers have never done well for x86) – Billy ONeal Sep 24 at 4:13.

Try CloudSigma, Defiantly can upload your own ISO's and run any x86 and 64bit OS you like on it. They have their in-house versions to get started but you can bring your own OS versions. Based in Switzerland but they would have also the servers in the US, performance i've expected to quite good.

Https://cloudsigma.com/ There is also a free trail on at the moment https://cs.cloudsigma. Com/accounts/signup.

It appears that the Xen Cloud Platform might do what you're after. This page ends with: Guest Operating Systems: the XCP binary distribution is delivered with a wide range of Linux and Widnows guests. Check out the release notes for a complete list.

And their PDF document Xen Cloud Platform Virtual Machine Installation Guide (Release 0.1, Published October 2009) says that Windows 2000 Server has "No known issues. " (I don't have any affiliation with Xen) In conjunction with the above, there is also a list of Xen VirtualPrivateServerProviders, several of which say they include Windows.

Xen doesn't operate a cloud service. (EC2, in fact, is built on Xen, though) – Billy ONeal Sep 23 at 22:03.

No, commercial cloud services like Azure and Amazon EC2 are themselves virtual, so you don't get a great deal of control over the operating system. An option may be to consider renting a full physical server (colocated, or managed) and then use a battery of virtual machines to run the tests. Something like VMWare's snapshot feature sounds perfect: spin up a clean virtual machine, deploy the test code, then throw away changes to the disk once the tests have been completed.

Or, indeed, as @Stuart suggests - run the tests locally.

They are themselves Virtual, but that doesn't mean their respective vendors couldn't put e.g. Windows XP on top of that same fabric. It's certainly not a technical limitation. I'm not looking to build this on top of Azure or EC2, I'm looking for something similar to Azure or EC2 which allows this kind of testing.

– Billy ONeal Sep 21 at 14:23 @Billy ONeal - indeed, although in the case of Azure Microsoft are quite stringent about their total control of the OS image. It's not quite Windows 2008 R2 on there... – Jeremy McGee Sep 21 at 14:25.

This definitely isn't something Azure offers - I think all of Azure's images are based near to Windows Server 2008 R2. For EC2 you could set up images for Server 2003 through to 2008R2 - but nothing else. There are also some services out there to assist with this - e.g. VaasNet vaasnet.com/catalog For testing the other Windows operating systems, I simply don't think there's a cloud service available to let you do this.

I don't even think there are any cloud services where you can run "Virtual PC" type applications on top of the hosted operating system - as I think most of the virtualization APIs are disabled in the cloud environments (virtualization within virtualization not supported! ) Sorry to say this, but your best bet may be local test hardware running VirtualPC images.

Looks like I'll be investing some money in a server then. :( – Billy ONeal Jun 12 at 16:35 I would at least attempt running VirtualBox on an EC2 instance before I bought hardware. – Jherico Sep 22 at 20:05.

I cant really gove you an answer,but what I can give you is a way to a solution, that is you have to find the anglde that you relate to or peaks your interest. A good paper is one that people get drawn into because it reaches them ln some way.As for me WW11 to me, I think of the holocaust and the effect it had on the survivors, their families and those who stood by and did nothing until it was too late.