I have been thinking about how to provide health monitoring to our clients, host servers for our consulting business, and have a flexible lab environment for testing and training. We don’t have a data center of our own, so I started looking at dedicated servers, virtual dedicated servers, etc. I was able to cave in and set up a dedicated server account with one of the top Google hits for “dedicated server hosting” (currently rackspace.com, theplanet.com, aplus.net). Then I was checking out the metro Ethernet offering from coloserve.com and saw their goGrid offering (http://www.gogrid.com/) which is like some crazy cloud computing platform, then I saw the Amazon EC2 (http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html?node=201590011) cloud computing platform. I was really surprised that this cloud computing it blowing up so much. EC2 only supports Linux, but why not just drop VMWare server on top and run what you want? (Talk about virtual machine! I wonder how many layers you are from the hardware?)
Ok, so I had problems with “C Header files” when I tried to install VMWare server. I might still beat on that later, but in the meantime I found that someone else has already gotten WIndows running on EC2 using Qemu: http://www.howtoforge.com/amazon_elastic_compute_cloud_qemu.
I also found out that the Amazon “Cloud” is really just running Xen and that it only recently became more cloud-like with the addition of “Availability Zones”: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/03/27/amazon_flexible_ec2.
Now I find that you need to regenerate your AMI each time you make a change!?!@#% How is this going to work for what we want to do??
http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/entry.jspa?externalID=1403&ref=featured
Maybe GOGRID is the way to go, but it doesn’t support multiple virtual processors… Maybe I should just call it a day and get a dedicated server after all..