Fun with vCloud Air's VPC OnDemand Program!

I think I'll call it vClair.

I've been an AWS / EC2 customer for about two years now. My relationship with them started with a "free trial" for the elastic computing cloud service that earned me some meaningless points on CloudCred. But I neglected to cancel my account after the free trial expired, and I've been paying about $50 a month ever since for a m3.medium Linux instance that does nothing more than host a private Minecraft server for my boys.

You'll immediately point out that $50 a month for a Minecraft server is insane, especially when Minecraft Realms is only $13 a month. You're right. But I also get a sandbox to mess around with, and an excuse to play with the AWS console. So for the time being, $50 a month is a reasonable price to pay.

But when VMware contacted me to offer me access to the vCloud Air VPC OnDemand program, I immediately thought about migrating my Minecraft server as a test case. Because, in the eyes of my boys, there is no workload as critical as a Minecraft server. Plus it's an excuse to learn how VMware's cloud offering compares with Amazon's.

I'll share with you, dear readers, what I learn about vCloud Air's VPC OnDemand offering in the next few weeks. Specifically, I'm interested in seeing how easy it is to not just import VMs into the VPC, but how easy it is to export those VMs. VMware likes to refer, pejoratively, to AWS as Hotel California (I don't need to sing / explain that, do I?). Let's see if vCloud Air's off-ramp is as easy to navigate as its on-ramp. Because no one wants to be locked into a solution.