I have had this post in my drafts for some time and I have been trying to get round publishing this for some time. I cannot go on about how good Cloudshare is and what a fantastic service and model they offer. In a nutshell they provide a cloud based service that individuals (Pro plus account) or enterprises can subscribe to provide a pooled hardware resource count, from here you can then add prebuilt and configured services or environments ranging from Linux, to Windows, to SharePoint 2010 and Exchange 2010 – this includes full licenses.
For a complete listing of all the machines they offer see here – http://www.cloudshare.com/products/proplus/availablemachines All these machines can be intergrated into your own network through the use of VPN’s etc and are spun up within a matter of minutes (sometimes sec’s).
Once you have signed up for a 14 day trial account then create an environment, edit that environment and select the machines that you want to be provisioned within that environment:
This will take some time for the machines to be built, from here you will be able to view the username and passwords for the machines within that domain, connect through an RDP client to the “public address” – BTW this will change every time you suspend and spin up your environment. Also note to get these details you need to view your environment and then select more details on the server / machine in question for example please look at the below screenshot:
Now to be frank that is it, hence the beauty of this service, my only concern for me (being a hardware monkey) is the RAM, CPU and Storage I require.
Thanks and go ans sign up for 14 days – what do you have to loose…!
