Amazon EC2 usable as a VMware testing platform?

Question

We have the need to perform tests on localized platforms that put some burden on our hardware resources because for just a few weeks we might need plenty of servers and clients (Windows 2003 and Windows 2008, Vista, XP, Red Hat, etc) in multiple languages.

We typically have relied on blades with Windows 2003 and VMWare, but sometimes these are overgrown by punctual needs and also have the issue that the acquisition and deployment process is quite slow if the environment needs to grow.

Is Amazon EC2/S3 usable in the following scenario?

1. Install VMWare (Desktop because we need the ability to have snapshots) on an Amazon AMI.
2. Load existing VMWare images from S3 and run them on EC2 instances (perhaps 3 or 4 server or client OSes on each EC2 instance.

We are more interested in the ability to very easily start or stop VMware snaphsots for relatively short tests. This is just for testing configurations, not a production environment to actually serve a user workload. The only real user is the tester. These configurations might be required for just a few weeks and then turned off for a few months until the next release requires them again.

Is EC2/S3 a viable alternative for this type of testing purpose?

Answer 1

Do you actually need VMWare, or are you testing software that runs in the VMWare VMs? You might actually need VMWare if you are testing e.g. VMWare deployment policy, or are running code that tests the VMWare APIs. Examples of the latter might be you are testing an application server stack and currently using VMWare to test on many platforms.

If you actually need VMWare, I do not believe that you can install VMWare in EC2. Someone will correct & enlighten me if this is not the case.

If you don't actually need VMWare, you have more options. If you can use one of the zillion public AMIs as a baseline, clone the appropriate AMIs and customize them to suit your needs (save the customized version as a private AMI for your team). Then, you can use as many of them as you like. Perhaps you already have a bunch of VMWare images that you need to use in your testing. In that case, you can migrate your VMWare image to an EC2 AMI as described in various places in Google, for example:

http://thewebfellas.com/blog/2008/9/1/creating-an-new-ec2-ami-from-within-vmware-or-from-vmdk-files

(Apologies to the SO censors for not pasting the entire article here. It's pretty long.) But that's a shortcut; you can always use the documented AMI creation process to convert any machine (VMWare or not) to an AMI. Perform that process for each VMWare VM you have, and you'll be all set. Just keep in mind that when you create an AMI, you have to upload it to S3, and that will take a lot of time for large VMs.

Answer 2

This is a bit of a shameless plug, but we have a new startup that may deal with exactly your problem. Amazon EC2 is excellent for on-demand computing, but is really targeted at just a single user launching production servers. We've extended EC2 to make it a Virtual Lab Management environment, with self-service, policies and VM sharing. You can check it out at http://LabSlice.com and see if it meets your needs.