Leasing Virtual Machines for load testing

Question

Hi All --

Does anybody know of a good company that leases VMs so I can load test my web app? I need to be able to change the CPUs, memory and configure a virtual web farm.

Thanks

Answer 1

Have you looked into Amazon EC2?

Answer 2

Amazon EC2, or one of the other upcoming public cloud services, is a good option for load testing, but you should bear a couple of things in mind:

• CPU and memory configurations are fixed. There are multiple available configurations varying from single core / 1.7GB RAM to 8 core / 15GB RAM, but you can't choose non standard CPU / RAM configurations or change the configuration once you've launched the VM.
• You pay for the EC2 instances as long as they are running. This can get pretty expensive for a large server farm, especially for the larger configurations. You may need to do some work to make sure that you can clone servers easily and launch them on demand as you scale up your load.