On Jan 20, 2015, VMware rolled out another version of Cloud service offering “vCloud Air On Demand”. This time VMware made the process very simple to access the service. Customers can use their credit cards to sign-up vCloud Air On Demand service(Pay-As-You-Go)(PAYG Model) and start their VMs in few clicks / minutes.
As a promotion, VMware offers 300$ credits to new customers
If someone wants to see the simplicity of accessing the service, I summarized the sign-up process and creating your first VM.
Click Sign-Up –> Fill in your Details –> Credit Card Details –> Confirm your account –> Set your first password –> Boom
Create your First Datacenter
For the first time you login, you will be asked where you want to create your first VPC (virtual private cloud).
You will be prompted to choose from available DCs, choose the one which closest to you .
Create your First VM
vCloud Air service supports a wide variety of 32 & 64 bit Operating System, below is the list of supported OS
vCloud Air Supported Operating Systems
The current Operating Systems supported by vCloud Director are:
|Microsoft Windows Server 2012 64-bit||Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6|
|Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2 64-bit||Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5|
|Microsoft Windows 8||Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4|
|Microsoft Windows 8.1||SUSE Enterprise Linux 11|
|Microsoft Windows 7||SUSE Enterprise Linux 10|
|Microsoft Windows Server 2008||Oracle Linux 6|
|Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 64-bit||Oracle Linux 5|
|Microsoft Windows Server 2003||Oracle Linux 4|
|Microsoft Windows Small Business Sever 32-bit||CentOS|
|Microsoft Windows Vista||Ubuntu Linux|
|Microsoft Windows XP Professional||Other 3.x Linux|
|Microsoft Windows 2000||Other 2.6.x Linux|
|Microsoft Windows NT||Other 2.4.x Linux|
|Microsoft Windows 3.1||Other Linux|
But thats not all, as vCloud Air runs on VMware vSphere, the full list of vCloud Air supported Operating Systems and application are in the vSphere HCL: http://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/search.php?deviceCategory=software&testConfig=16
Look at this article for allowing a VM to connect internet.
Also the billing and pricing is granular and can be viewed in the On-demand portal Resource Usage dashboard.
VMware has a pricing calculator / planner in their website, so a user can check approximate billing information prior signing up the service.
So overall look at vCloud Air Ondemand looks promising and really useful when you need a VM/Resources real quick without any hassle.