Does a cloud service like Azure or EC2 exist which can run arbitrary workloads? (e.g. Client SKUs of Windows)

Azure and EC2 are optimized for running servers. Lots and lots of servers. Both platforms attempt to manage tons of things for you -- in Azure's case, it wants to manage even the target operating system.开发者_运维问答

However, I'd like to use such a service for a different reason: Testing.

I've got a ton of operating systems I need to support. My tests don't actually take that long, but running them on every platform is time consuming. I was going to just use a cloud service for this, thinking that these machines would be running for much less than an hour, and it wouldn't cost all that much.

The problem is that the major cloud services won't run client versions of Windows -- Windows Server only.

Is there a cloud service which would let me run every client and server version, and every service pack level, of Windows released starting with Windows 2000 SP4 to the present day?

Try CloudSigma, Defiantly can upload your own ISO's and run any x86 and 64bit OS you like on it. They have their in-house versions to get started but you can bring your own OS versions.

Based in Switzerland but they would have also the servers in the US, performance i've expected to quite good. https://www.cloudsigma.com/

There is also a free trail on at the moment
https://cs.cloudsigma.com/accounts/signup/

The list of Open Virtualization Alliance members may have some candidates for you.

A search on the page for "operating system" suggests the following possibilities (in addition to the already-mentioned CloudSigma):

1. ElasticHosts
2. stepping stone GmbH (I'm less sure about this one)
3. Sublime IP

No, commercial cloud services like Azure and Amazon EC2 are themselves virtual, so you don't get a great deal of control over the operating system.

An option may be to consider renting a full physical server (colocated, or managed) and then use a battery of virtual machines to run the tests. Something like VMWare's snapshot feature sounds perfect: spin up a clean virtual machine, deploy the test code, then throw away changes to the disk once the tests have been completed.

Or, indeed, as @Stuart suggests - run the tests locally.

This definitely isn't something Azure offers - I think all of Azure's images are based near to Windows Server 2008 R2.

For EC2 you could set up images for Server 2003 through to 2008R2 - but nothing else. There are also some services out there to assist with this - e.g. VaasNet http://www.vaasnet.com/catalog

For testing the other Windows operating systems, I simply don't think there's a cloud service available to let you do this. I don't even think there are any cloud services where you can run "Virtual PC" type applications on top of the hosted operating system - as I think most of the virtualization APIs are disabled in the cloud environments (virtualization within virtualization not supported!)

Sorry to say this, but your best bet may be local test hardware running VirtualPC images.

It appears that the Xen Cloud Platform might do what you're after. This page ends with:

Guest Operating Systems: the XCP binary distribution is delivered with a wide range of Linux and Widnows guests. Check out the release notes for a complete list.

And their PDF document Xen Cloud Platform Virtual Machine Installation Guide (Release 0.1, Published October 2009) says that Windows 2000 Server has "No known issues."

(I don't have any affiliation with Xen)

In conjunction with the above, there is also a list of Xen VirtualPrivateServerProviders, several of which say they include Windows.

Buy time on an EC2 instance and use it to host VirtualBox VMs with VMs set up for each operating system you want to test for. Use a RDP client or VNC or some other means to control the guest OS. This forum post seems to point to that being possible. But yes it is not a cloud service itself and you would have todo some initial setup and configuration work yourself.