CloudShare pro - Free!!

gosh1976

Anybody have any experience with CludShare Pro? It seems like a pretty neat resource. I just signed up and set up a number of different machines. I could see it being something that people here could find useful for work or learning. I stumbled upon a link for it on another forum and thought I would share it here for those that don't know about it.

It's free while it's in beta. http://www.cloudshare.com/Products/CloudShare-Pro/CloudShare-Pro-overview.aspx

Hand Out Copies of Your Own Mini-Datacenter

CloudShare Pro is designed for individuals and small teams who want to run complete, networked systems in the cloud and share copies with other colleagues for collaboration. A smaller version of CloudShare Enterprise - which supports unlimited end-user invitations and VM parameters, advanced analytics and management hierarchies, and customized branding - CloudShare Pro provides a quick and easy way to create, share, manage and track multiple complete, virtual IT environments.

Currently available CloudShare Pro VM templates:

* CentOS 5 – bare, or with KDE, MySQL, or RubyOnRails pre-installed
* Windows 7
* Windows XP Professional - bare, or with Office 2010 or Office 2007 pre-installed
* Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Edition – bare, or with SQL Server 2008, CRM Dynamics, or Active Directory pre-installed
* Windows Server 2003 R2 Enterprise Edition – bare, or with Oracle 11g or Microsoft Sharepoint pre-installed

earweed

Looks pretty good to me. I wonder how long the Pro will be free?

tbgree00

When I followed the link I got a big red screen that said it was a reported unsafe website and contained malicious software. I'm running IE8. Any truth to that alert?

earweed

Worked fine for me with IE8. It may be your AV, mine said it was safe.

wedge1988

nope, says unsafe to me too.

It's if you have smartscreen filter on. generally i go with the flow...

earweed

It's really slow. I may use it to check out the full version of Sharepoint but that's about it, if that. At the rate it creates your VM's you have time to go eat lunch while it's doing it.
Can't get it to work. It is stuck on wanting to download an Active-x and then tells me to refresh the browser and then wants to reinstall the Active-x. Probably best to just avoid it.

joey74055

THANKS!! I haven't tried it yet but this has been EXACTLY what I have been looking for!

gosh1976

hmm I was using firefox when I set my environment up and didn't have any trouble but I tried it in IE and I get the same warning. I think I'll send them an email and a message to their twitter account about it. I'll let you know if I get a response.

It does take a while to get the VM's to boot but once they are running there is no typing or mouse delay which is impressive to me. I wonder if it takes that long every time you reboot your environment? If so it wouldn't be very practical for sales demos which is one of uses they are marketing their product for...

earweed

Yeah they want you to get the enterprise version which isn't free also.

gosh1976

earweed wrote: »

Yeah they want you to get the enterprise version which isn't free also.

No big surprise with that. They have to make money to pay employees and keep the servers running.

If I were to use this in a production environment I would have to look into the Enterprise edition and see how much they charge. Apparently the more users they have logged in to Pro the slower the machines are to boot up but with Enterprise you have dedicated resources and no slow downs. According to the forum on the site they are in the process of adding more resources to the Pro version servers. But, for testing and learning purposes the free version is still pretty cool.

tpatt100

I bookmarked it and will sign up this afternoon and read the documentation. Thanks for the info.

anobomski

the free pro version is no longer available which is a shame. all existing pro environments will be deleted after april 10 though you do get the option to upgrade to proplus for 2 months