
Announcing VM Import for Amazon EC2 - jonmc12
http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2010/12/15/announcing-vm-import/
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DanielBMarkham
Amazon continues to amaze me with what they are setting up.

I've had my problems with some of their policies, but overall they are really
doing a bang-up job. They are doing what any good business does: they are
making it really hard to pick any other alternative.

I really like the idea of moving VMs in and out of the cloud. Can't emphasize
enough how neat that is. If other vendors start implementing this, we could
have true infrastructure portability. Very cool.

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phuff
One problem I've had at every place employment I've worked at in the last few
years is getting a VM which matches production to use as a sandbox. With this
kind of thing it would make that a snap. "What's the difference between this
and production?" "Nothing. It's the same image."

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DanielBMarkham
Yep

Not only that, but many enterprise systems are not just a server, or even a
couple of servers, but a cluster of servers of various configurations.

With good bandwidth, you could pull the entire bunch down locally to use in
dev and testing. That's unheard of as far as I know (although it has been the
holy grail for some time) Businesses that start and grow in an environment
like this are going to have significant advantages over older businesses.

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ronnier
Hopefully VirtualBox support will be added at some point. It's amazing what
Amazon is doing with AWS.

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krobertson
They announce it when only support Windows Server 2008 SP2? Seems rather
underwhelming when that is all you can import.

Building an AMI or cooking with chef/knife is easy enough, but I know a lot of
people who'd like that kind of simplicity. Just too bad it is only one OS.

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nopal
It's just a starting point.

And I bet they focused on Windows because there aren't as many great
provisioning tools as there are for Linux.

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eli
Out of curiosity, how do people currently build a custom new EC2 image? Spin
up a base instance and then run a script?

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ollysb
We start with a base image and then use puppet to manage anything that needs
to be installed/setup.

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cowmixtoo
I don't understand why more people don't use bcfg2. Its awesome for this
purpose (and I think better than puppet or chef.)

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nodata
Then educate people! Don't just say it's better, say why!

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rythie
I'd like to see export.

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simonw
Interesting that they support importing VMware images - I was under the
impression that EC2 used Xen.

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logic
Converting between image types isn't too big of a deal; qemu-img can convert
between most of your common on-disk formats (including VMDK), and wouldn't be
hard to extend to whatever they're using behind the scenes.

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borism
I wonder if I can convert my old dusty Win XP Parallels image and VM-import it
into EC2... That would be pretty cool!

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jeffbarr
We support specific versions of Windows 2008 SP2 at present, with plans to add
other versions and other OS's over time, with a focus on server OSs (as
opposed to desktop).

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boredguy8
This is an amazing change that hugely reduces the cost of transitioning to
AWS. We're deploying VMs on Xen at our university and have talked about AWS
but there's a high 'coefficient of static friction'. This could change that
whole discussion. Well played.

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gamma_raj
Beautiful

