Agreed. Cloud VMs are fine for doing testing but I'd only recommend this where you need a lot of grunt for a short period, and you haven't the necessary local infrastructure (Windows Server 2012 makes it so much easier). There is a wonderful comment about hosting production databases in the cloud in the book 'Bad Data Handbook'. Chapter 14 'The Myths of Cloud Computing'.
Cloud computing
is fantastic for stateless, process heavy jobs, such as most application servers. The
cloud has historically been weaker at jobs where state matters. Data processing typically
falls in the middle of these two. For me, the ideal infrastructure would include the best
of both worlds: easy management of stateful machines running on optimized hardware
connected via LAN to commoditized cloud nodes for application processing. It’s important
to recognize that these cloud offerings are still infants in their life cycles.
Do you hit VM problems generally with SQL Server or just in the cloud? I use them for automated tests and Sandboxing, but for nothing else.
Best wishes,
Phil Factor