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If you’ve dedicated significant effort to developing “golden” Linux images tailored for your on-premises setup, there’s exciting news on the horizon. We have enhanced our widely used VM Import/Export functionality to include support for various Linux distributions and virtualization formats. Now, you can import those carefully crafted images from VMware, Xen, and Microsoft Hyper-V environments and create the corresponding AMIs (Amazon Machine Images). Additionally, you can export Linux images similar to how it’s done with Windows instances today.
Why Import?
This feature serves multiple purposes. If you’ve invested considerable time and resources into creating a robust process for generating, certifying, and tracking golden images, you can now incorporate that work into a full or partial migration to the AWS cloud. Furthermore, importing images can be crucial for your disaster recovery strategy, ideally before any calamity occurs—because the data transfer process can be extensive, prior planning will significantly reduce recovery time.
When migrating existing applications and workloads to AWS, VM Import allows you to generate Amazon EC2 instances directly from your VMs, preserving the existing software and configurations within those VMs.
The Details
We are launching support for 64-bit Linux images in the following formats:
- VMware – ESX and VMware Workstation VMDK
- Citrix Xen – VHD
- Microsoft Hyper-V VHD
These images must utilize the Grub bootloader (either the legacy version or the newer Grub 2) and a standard kernel. Ensure that DHCP is enabled, and that any firewall configurations (iptables or similar) permit access to the instance post-import. The root filesystem must be formatted in ext2, ext3, ext4, Btrfs, JFS, or XFS; you can have /boot on a separate partition from /, but both should reside on the same disk.
We support the following distributions and versions:
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1 – 6.5
- CentOS 5.1 – 6.5
- Ubuntu 12.04, 12.10, 13.04, 13.10
- Debian 6.0.0 – 6.0.8, 7.0.0 – 7.2.0
The import process generates an AMI in HVM format, which can be launched on various EC2 instance types such as:
- cc1.4xlarge
- cc2.8xlarge
- cg1.4xlarge
- cr1.8xlarge
- hi1.4xlarge
- hs1.8xlarge
- m3.2xlarge
- m3.xlarge
Once imported, the AMI will reside in a specific AWS Region. You can utilize the Cross-Region AMI Copy feature to duplicate AMIs in other Regions as required.
For importing Linux images, you can utilize your existing EC2 AMI tools by specifying Linux as the platform when executing ec2-import-instance. If you’re using the VM Import Connector for VMware vCenter, be sure to update to the latest version to import Linux images.
Learn More
To get started with VM Import for Linux, here are several helpful resources:
For more insights on onboarding, consider checking out this post about essential work attire here. Additionally, for HR professionals, you can find valuable tools in this resource from SHRM here. Finally, if you’re looking for community insights, this thread on Reddit is an excellent resource here.
Talk to Us
As with every new feature from AWS, we are eager to hear your thoughts and feedback to help prioritize future developments. Please feel free to share your comments on this blog post or in the EC2 forum.
— Chanci Turner
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