vCloud Express

vCloud Express servers are powered by an enterprise-class computing layer running VMware vSphere and a fully redundant fibre-attached storage system. In the unlikely event of a hardware failure, VMware HA will automatically restart any failed virtual servers on the remaining cluster nodes.

Amazon EC2

The platform Amazon EC2 uses lacks a clustered hypervisor, so in the event of a hardware failure your servers are down until you deploy a new instance.

vCloud Express

With a wide range of customizable server sizes ranging from one to eight virtual processors and from 512MB up to 16GB of memory, vCloud Express fits the requirements of almost any application. Our flexible storage configuration utilities allow you to start small with a single 10GB storage partition or scale to a single server with 15 storage partitions totaling more than 7TB.

Changing the resources of a particular server is easy, too. Simply use our configuration tools to adjust the number of processors, amount of memory or storage capacity—all without having to redeploy or rebuild the server and reload your applications.

Amazon EC2

With Amazon EC2 your choices are limited to one of five different memory and compute unit options. There’s no freedom to configure your instances to the exact tuning requirements of your applications. And if you need to scale up or scale down a particular instance, you cannot simply change its configuration—you must delete your instance and start over with a new one.

vCloud Express

Build out your environment with a number of leading Operating System deployment options. vCloud Express lets you leverage one of our many preconfigured deployment templates for Windows, Red Hat, CentOS and Ubuntu—or use our Blank Server deployment system and install one of 450-plus operating systems/versions that are compatible with our hypervisor. Our goal is to provide you with easy-to-use templates that are current with the latest releases of the most popular operating systems.

Amazon EC2

Amazon EC2 provides you with some preconfigured operating system templates, but you have to leverage their partners and customers to build and customize Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) to expand your choices. In addition, there are only a few prebuilt templates for the most current versions of many popular operating systems.

vCloud Express

With vCloud Express you can implement your servers or power off your servers for future use; they remain persistent within your environment until you delete them. You never have to worry about losing your data when temporarily retiring a server or performing out-of-production maintenance—or when you want to have servers on standby for rapid growth.

Amazon EC2

There’s no way to simply power off servers with Amazon EC2. Either they’re on and ready to process data or they have to be deleted to suspend them from your environment. Once they’re deleted you have to reattach your applications and data to run another instance.

vCloud Express

The vCloud Express user interface provides you with numerous tools and features to help you administer your servers, storage and network features without having to write a single line of code. You can do it all with the click of a mouse and configuration wizards. The user interface allows you to: build a server, copy a server, reboot a server, connect to the server’s console during the boot-up process, mount ISOs, manipulate the server’s IPs, and manage your firewall and load balancer without having to understand APIs or web services.

Amazon EC2

Although Amazon EC2 provides you with a graphical user interface to perform some functions, you still have to understand programming languages and web services protocols to use some of the more advanced features like reboot instances, view console outputs, configure firewalls and manage load balancing.