Now Available: Amazon EC2 Running Red Hat Enterprise Linux

We continue to add options to AWS in order to give our customers the freedom and flexibility that they need to build and run applications of all different shapes and sizes.

I'm pleased to be able to tell you that you can now run Red Hat Enterprise Linux on EC2 with support from Amazon and Red Hat. You can now launch 32 and 64-bit instances in every AWS Region and on every EC2 instance type. You can choose between versions 5.5, 5.6, 6.0, and 6.1 of RHEL. You can also launch AMIs right from AWS Console's Quick Start Wizard. Consult the full list of AMI's to get started.

If you are a member of Red Hat's Cloud Access program you can use your existing licenses. Otherwise, you can run RHEL on On-Demand instances now, with Spot and Reserved Instances planned for the future. Pricing for On-Demand instances is available here.

All customers running RHEL on EC2 have access to an update repository operated by Red Hat. AWS Premium Support customers can contact AWS to obtain support from Amazon and Red Hat.

-- Jeff;

 

Comments

[Mikael Gueck]

When I start up a 64-bit m2.4xlarge RHEL 6.1 instance, it only shows 32GB of memory?

[Robfico]

Can you run any application using RHEL 5, i.e. Perl, PHP, MySQL, etc... just as if it's a regular dedicated server? Or only Amazon approved db's / applications?

Just trying to see the benefit to having a LAMP install on Amazon. Thanks.

[Darren Austin]

As part of my job we've been rolling out Slackware based AMIs into EC2. As a result, i've made some effort to produce a couple of "public" AMIs of Slackware64 13.37, in case anyone was interested in running them on EC2.

There are currently two AMIs in different regions:
us-east-1: ami-74eb121d
slackware-us-amis/Slackware64-13.37-PVGrub-USeast1-Public-2/Slackware64-13.37-PVGrub-USeast1-Public-2.manifest.xml

eu-west-1: ami-eaae989e
slackware-eu-amis/Slackware64-13.37-PVGrub-EUwest1-Public-2/Slackware64-13.37-PVGrub-EUwest1-Public-2.manifest.xml

These AMIs are Slackware64 13.37, (mostly) full install of package sets: a ap d e l n tcl y. A few packages have been left out since they are useless on EC2 (lilo for example), but on the whole it should be a near complete "server" type install of Slackware.

I've compiled a Xen kernel for the AMI - it's the same version as the one from 13.37, but i've modularised all stuff which is not directly required to get the imstance up and running. The boot uses a PVGrub set up, so the kernel can be updated within the image or the boot params changed.

Feel free to get in touch if there are any problems, requests, issues etc or if you want some more into about using the AMIs.

Hope some of you find them useful :)

Darren Austin - Systems Administrator, Widgit Software.
Email: darren (at) widgit (dot) com
Tel: +44 (0)1926 333680. Web: http://www.widgit.com/
26 Queen Street, Cubbington, Warwickshire, CV32 7NA, UK.