Windows – EC2 AMI for QA Testing on XP, Vista, or Win7

amazon ec2cloud computingtestingwindows

I need to perform QA testing for Windows based applications on a Windows desktop client and I would like to know if EC2 supports Windows images that are NOT server based (e.g. Server 2003). I have searched and found many posts that suggest that Amazon does not have desktop clients on their roadmap, but nothing definitive from Amazon themselves.

If EC2 does not support desktop installations of Windows, is there a service out that that does?

Thanks

Best Answer

I would suspect the answer will be no, because Amazon S3 has to use SPLA licensing for their windows installs and Desktop OS's are not available on SPLA. I would suggest some sort of local virtualisation and an MSDN licence.