FMS on Cloud Hosting?

A virutalized environment isn't ideal for FMS, for a number of reasons:

1. A VM is often subject to varied clock jitter, which can really screw (yeah, that's a technical term) with clock based operations involved in media streams. I've seen all sorts of goofiness, including odd pauses in the streams, loss of audio/video sync, and loss of audio altogether.

2. If the hardware is shared (for example, in the EC2 environment) you'll be in competition for network and disk resources with the other VM's running on the hardware (cloud services often guarantee processor and memory resources, but can't/won't guarantee disk time or bandwidth). If you don't control the hardware and the network uplink, you'll never know if the other VM's running on the hardware will eat up all of the available bandwidth or bog down the disk to the point where your streams can't perform.

3. Some virtualized environments require a checksum each time a file is requested. This can be a major performance hurdle, especially when dealing with large files.

As for the licensing, the FMS license is not IP based, so as long as FMS is properly installed when the VM starts up, FMS will work. You'd need to build an image that includes directives to write the license key to the ini file when the disk image mounts.

FMS will run on a VM, but I'd recommend going with dedicated hardware for any production environment. It will save you endless headaches trying to chase down performance problems.