Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) vs VMware ESXi

• EC2 makes right-sizing your servers a breeze. You can quickly spin up a server in the cloud and if it turns out the vCPU, RAM, or storage space is wrong, within minutes you can change all of that.
• EC2 makes backups and restores a breeze. We actually had a client that allowed a hacker to remote into their production server. We were able to shutdown the EC2 instance, spin up a backup from an AMI, and then attach the existing elastic IP. This was all done within a 15 minute window.
• EC2 makes quickly deploying multiple servers a very easy. Within minutes, you can deploy a whole fleet of cloud servers.
• EC2 is easy to script. We are able to save our clients a lot of money by scripting their EC2 instance to shutdown/startup at predetermined times so they are only paying for the server when they are using it.

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• Support of so many operating systems including various Windows and Unix, including many variations.
• API PowerCLI scripting can help automated enterprise tasks to scale
• Virtualizing physical servers provides much higher ROI compared to non-virtualized servers running a single OS
• ESXi loads in ram on the server & it's small so the hypervisor uses very little of the hosts resources

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• EC2 in my opinion, is lacking the ability to connect to a console from within the AWS console. I sometimes miss how I can connect to the console with VMware and Hyper-V but not with EC2. You have to utilize RDP or SSH to connect to an instance.
• Sometimes EC2 instances lockup due to reasons with the underlying hardware and need to be shutdown and the started back up so the instance can spin up on new hardware. This is sometimes a problem because unless you set up proper alerting/scripting, you don't know there is an issue until a user reports it.
• EC2 can be a bit daunting for the beginning user. You really do need some kind of training before you dive in.

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• A bit overpriced
• Performance issues
• Application and hardware compatibility

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• At previous businesses we wouldn't have been able to run our infrastructure reliably without EC2. No more hour-long downtimes because Verizon decided to change our server's IP address without warning.
• On the CI project, EC2 allowed us to iterate quickly and scale the CI tool on demand, without having the massive upfront cost of setting up our own server farm.
• EC2 also allows us to easily spawn development machines when we need to connect mobile apps to a development backend, letting us iterate more quickly with partners.

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• Great return in savings on physical systems
• Great savings not having to buy so many physical machines, when you can just build new VM systems at no cost and a few minutes
• Turning P2V had really helped out again saving money not having to replace old or failed systems

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