{"id":446,"date":"2010-04-16T09:11:29","date_gmt":"2010-04-16T14:11:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.webadminblog.com\/?p=446"},"modified":"2010-04-15T15:15:07","modified_gmt":"2010-04-15T20:15:07","slug":"amazon-web-services-convert-tofrom-vms","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.webadminblog.com\/index.php\/2010\/04\/16\/amazon-web-services-convert-tofrom-vms\/","title":{"rendered":"Amazon Web Services &#8211; Convert To\/From VMs?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In the recent Amazon AWS Newsletter, they asked the following:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\n<span><span>Some customers have asked us about ways to easily convert virtual machines from  VMware vSphere, Citrix Xen Server, and Microsoft Hyper-V to Amazon EC2 instances  &#8211; and vice versa. If this is something that you&#8217;re interested in, we would like  to hear from you. Please send an email to <a href=\"mailto:aws-vm@amazon.com\">aws-vm@amazon.com<\/a> describing your needs and  use case.<\/span><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I&#8217;ll share my reply here for comment!<\/p>\n<p>This is a killer feature that allows a number of important activities.<\/p>\n<p>1.\u00a0 <strong>Product VMs<\/strong>.\u00a0 Many suppliers are starting to provide third-party products in the form of VMs instead of software to ease install complexity, or in an attempt to move from a hardware appliance approach to a more-software approach.\u00a0 This pretty much prevents their use in EC2.\u00a0 &lt;cue sad music&gt;\u00a0 As opposed to &#8220;Hey, if you can VM-ize your stuff then you&#8217;re pretty close to being able to offer it as an Amazon AMI or even SaaS offering.&#8221;\u00a0 &lt;schwing!&gt;<\/p>\n<p>2.\u00a0 <strong>Leveraging VM Investments<\/strong>.\u00a0 For any organization that already has a VM infrastructure, it allows for reduction of cost and complexity to be able to manage images in the same way.\u00a0 It also allows for the much promised but under-delivered &#8220;cloud bursting&#8221; theory where you can run the same systems locally and use Amazon for excess capacity.\u00a0 In the current scheme I could make some AMIs &#8220;mostly&#8221; like my local VMs &#8211; but &#8220;close&#8221; is not good enough to use in production.<\/p>\n<p>3.\u00a0<strong> Local testing<\/strong>.\u00a0 I&#8217;d love to be able to bring my AMIs &#8220;down to me&#8221; for rapid redeploy.\u00a0 I often find myself having to transfer 2.5 gigs of software up to the cloud, install it, find a problem, have our devs fix it and cut another release, transfer it up again (2 hour wait time again, plus paying $$ for the transfer)&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>4.\u00a0 <strong>Local troubleshooting. <\/strong> We get an app installed up in the cloud and it&#8217;s not acting quite right and we need to instrument it somehow to debug.\u00a0 This process is much easier on a local LAN with the developers&#8217; PCs with all their stuff installed.<\/p>\n<p>5.\u00a0<strong> Local development.<\/strong> A lot of our development exercises the Amazon APIs.\u00a0 This is one area where Azure has a distinct advantage and can be a threat; in Visual Studio there is a &#8220;local Azure fabric&#8221; and a dev can write their app and have it running &#8220;in Azure&#8221; but on their machine, and then when they&#8217;re ready deploy it up.\u00a0 This is slightly more than VM consumption, it&#8217;s VMs plus Eucalyptus or similar porting of the Amazon API to the client side, but it&#8217;s a killer feature.<\/p>\n<p>Xen or VMWare would be fine &#8211; frankly this would be big enough for us I&#8217;d change virtualization solutions to the one that worked with EC2.<\/p>\n<p>I just asked one of our developers for his take on value for being able to transition between VMs and EC2 to include in this email, and his response is &#8220;Well, it&#8217;s just a no-brainer, right?&#8221;\u00a0 Right.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In the recent Amazon AWS Newsletter, they asked the following: Some customers have asked us about ways to easily convert virtual machines from VMware vSphere, Citrix Xen Server, and Microsoft Hyper-V to Amazon EC2 instances &#8211; and vice versa. If this is something that you&#8217;re interested in, we would like to hear from you. Please [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[82,35],"tags":[36,42,39,627,40,623],"class_list":["post-446","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cloud-computing","category-virtualization","tag-amazon","tag-aws","tag-cloud","tag-cloud-computing","tag-ec2","tag-virtualization"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pfI0c-7c","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.webadminblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/446","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.webadminblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.webadminblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.webadminblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.webadminblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=446"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.webadminblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/446\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":448,"href":"https:\/\/www.webadminblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/446\/revisions\/448"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.webadminblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=446"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.webadminblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=446"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.webadminblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=446"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}