VM Export Service For Amazon EC2

The AWS VM Import service gives you the ability to import virtual machines in a variety of formats into Amazon EC2, allowing you to easily migrate from your on-premises virtualization infrastructure to the AWS Cloud. Today we are adding the next element to this service. You now have the ability to export previously imported EC2 instances back to your on-premises environment.

You can initiate and manage the export with the latest version of the EC2 command line (API) tools. Download and install the tools, and then export the instance of your choice like this:

ec2-create-instance-export-task –e vmware -b NAME-OF-S3-BUCKET INSTANCE-ID

Note that you need to specify the Instance ID and the name of an S3 bucket to store the exported virtual machine image.

You can monitor the export process using ec2-describe-export-tasks and you can cancel unfinished tasks using ec2-cancel-export-task.

Once the export task has completed you need only download the exported image to your local environment.

The service can export Windows Server 2003 (R2) and Windows Server 2008 EC2 instances to VMware ESX-compatible VMDK, Microsoft Hyper-V VHD or Citrix Xen VHD images. We plan to support additional operating systems, image formats and virtualization platforms in the future.

Let us know what you think, and what other features, platforms and operating systems you would like us to support.

-- Jeff;

Comments

[Christian Reilly]

Hi Jeff - any support for KVM in the pipeline ?

[David Bullock]

Jeff,

Would VirtualBox support be possible?

- Dave

[Justin Rovang]

Dave:
Virtualbox will allow you to create VM's using VMDK

AWS:
This is simply stellar and a huge strategic move. Great work!

[Kevin Burke]

Can you support importing Github for Enterprise? It's distributed as an OVF file. Would be really useful for us.

[Jeff Barr]

@Kevin, that's already supported:

http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/UploadingYourInstancesandVolumes.html#ExportingYourVMVMware

[Skillachie]

So the export service currently only works for Windows based EC2 instances. No linux ?

[Steven Garner]

Ubuntu 12-04 LTS instances into Xen Hypervisor virtual machine images.

[Andrew Bond]

What performance can be expected for exporting VMs with this service?

[Greg Kuhnen]

We'd be interested in Linux support, specifically x64 versions of CentOS, RedHat, and possibly Ubuntu.

[Florent]

What about Proxmox/OpenVZ ? We use Proxmox PVE internally with great success, and would really really love to be able to push/grab images from cloud to local at will

[Dean W. Armstrong]

"The service can export Windows Server 2003 (R2) and Windows Server 2008 EC2 instances to VMware ESX-compatible VMDK, Microsoft Hyper-V VHD or Citrix Xen VHD images"

I assume you mean Windows Server 2008 R2?

[Joe Chiu]

What is the timeline for VM converter to support earlier MS 2003 edition?

[James Francey]

What's the timeline on being able to export Ubuntu instances?

[Eric Darby]

RedHat and Oracle Linux would be HUGE!!!