Ephemeral and Free Virtual Machines in CloudShare

This last week I've been looking for a way of hiring IaaS great! I've learnt a new acronym for torturing people and via twitter Luis Ruiz, a friend of mine, told me to try CloudShare. I was busy and I didn't listen to his advice at first... TOO BAD.

At CloudShare they offer you can create virtual environments for free. With the software and licenses for the same price.

They have a lot of basic virtual machine templates that will help you to have your virtual machine up & running in less than 10 minutes (including the registration time).

For a reasonable price of nothing at all they give you 3 CPUs, 120GB of HD and 6144MB of RAM plus the licenses and software for your machines.

If you decide to pay for a ProPlus account (49$) you can choose more complex templates like SharePoint 2010:

Yes it works here but not in Azure VM Role...

When you start your machine you'll have your URL available to access it, everything surprisingly easy. You can share your virtual machines with other CloudShare users and you can take snapshots and revert to them in case you break something...

The downside of this is that the virtual machines are suspended after 30 minutes of inactivity (and when you wake them up they have a different external IP), but even though it's a fantastic free environment for demoing and testing.

Use my advice and try it.

And you can't connect through VPN in the free version, just in case you were thinking in avoiding MegaVideo time limit...