AWS costs vs home server

For lab use, I think upgrading your ESX is the safer bet. AWS does support HA, and you probably may only need additional storage and RAM on your ESX server (I personally get by fine on a 32GB RAM core i5 desktop with an SSD using Vmware Workstation)

AWS as far as I know does not provide a "serial" Console, for one thing, and that can be a useful thing to have, if your lab machine is going to get a lot of experimenting done.

aye, I had read more about AWS and the lack of a connection to the serial port is a serious short coming. I have had issues in the past where the only way to fix a box was via the serial port so I wouldn't want to trust my production traffic to something that didn't give this ability.

The answer depends on your needs. If you are going to maintain BIG-IP appliances and VEs regularly in your own datacenter, you'll want to be testing with something similar. That way you can understand how HA failover works in your own datacenters and have access to the serial console.

You may want to use AWS if you were planning to deploy that in production. There are some differences in the networking setup and behavior that are specific to BIG-IP on AWS. Running an HA pair in AWS is also slightly different than in your own datacenter, so if you plan to do it in the future then now is a good time to get started.

You might also prefer AWS over hardware costs for very short bursts of testing or validation like API (rest/iControl) integration testing.

Hey Chris,

I decided to use AWS instead of purchasing a home server for both cost, speed and maintenance reasons. I've no interest in learning about VMware in a single server scenario.

Using a 200Mb Good instance is currently working out at around $0.50 an hour. I stop everything when its not in use which obviously saves money. Signing up for the 'free tier' also gives you the ability to spin up free Linux and Windows hosts and create a pretty decent lab setup. I've yet to top $10 a month. As you have your own licenses its even cheaper.

As Daniel has said, some of the AWS ways of doing things isn't too obvious to a network guy but with some planning and forethought and once you've read all the F5 guides its not too bad. Of course, its also very easy to zap it all and start again.

I managed to get hold of a license recently so I rebuilt everything from scratch. I'm currently running with a Best license on an M3.xlarge with SSD disk for $0.28 an hr. There are other minor costs for storage etc. but it shouldn't top 0.50hr.

At last a decent answer as opposed to the usual 'It costs a fortune!' from people who don't actually know... Thanks :-)