Importing your physical and virtual machines into AWS

AWS provides you with the ability to import on-premise machines into thier cloud.

Firstly if your existing machine is physical you should download the vCenter converter from below:

https://www.vmware.com/products/converter

Once you have converted your physical machine into a virtualized format you should download and install the AWS Command Line Interface from:

http://aws.amazon.com/cli/

There are also some pre-requisites on importing / exporting machines from AWS - including the operating system support:

- Microsoft Windows Server 2003 (with at least SP1)
- Microsoft Windows Server 2003 R2
- Microsoft Windows Server 2008
- Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2
- Microsoft Windows Server 2012
- Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2
- Windows 7
- Windows 8
- Windows 8.1
- Various Linux Versions

Disk images must be in either VHD, VMDK or OVA containers.

For a more detailed list please see:

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/VMImportPrerequisites.html

We wil proceed by uploading our VMDK image to AWS via the AWS Command Line Interface by opening up a command prompt:

cd C:\Program Files\Amazon\AWSCLI
aws --version

Run the following to configure your AWS command line client:

aws configure

We will also need to create a specific role that will allow us to perform the import process - so we should create a file named "role.json" containing the following:

{
   "Version":"2012-10-17",
   "Statement":[
      {
         "Sid":"",
         "Effect":"Allow",
         "Principal":{
            "Service":"vmie.amazonaws.com"
         },
         "Action":"sts:AssumeRole",
         "Condition":{
            "StringEquals":{
               "sts:ExternalId":"vmimport"
            }
         }
      }
   ]
}

and create the role, specifying the file we just created:

aws iam create-role --role-name vmimport --assume-role-policy-document file://role.json

We will also have to create a role policy - so create another file called "policy.json" and insert the following (replacing <disk-image-file-bucket> with the bucket where you VMDK file is stored:

{
   "Version":"2012-10-17",
   "Statement":[
      {
         "Effect":"Allow",
         "Action":[
            "s3:ListBucket",
            "s3:GetBucketLocation"
         ],
         "Resource":[
            "arn:aws:s3:::<disk-image-file-bucket>"
         ]
      },
      {
         "Effect":"Allow",
         "Action":[
            "s3:GetObject"
         ],
         "Resource":[
            "arn:aws:s3:::<disk-image-file-bucket>/*"
         ]
      },
      {
         "Effect":"Allow",
         "Action":[
            "ec2:ModifySnapshotAttribute",
            "ec2:CopySnapshot",
            "ec2:RegisterImage",
            "ec2:Describe*"
         ],
         "Resource":"*"
      }
   ]
}

And then run the following command to apply the policy:

aws iam put-role-policy --role-name vmimport --policy-name vmimport --policy-document file://policy.json

Proceed by creating a new S3 bucket (if needed) for the VMDK file:

aws s3 mb s3://bucket-name

And copy the VMDK on your local file system to the newly created bucket:

aws s3 cp C:\path-to-vmdk\vm.vmdk s3://bucket-name/test2.txt

Finally verify it has uploaded successfuly:

aws s3 ls s3://mybucket

We can now use the import-image command to import the image into AWS.

For importing multiple VMDK's we can use:

$ aws ec2 import-image --cli-input-json "{  \"Description\": \"Windows 2008 VMDKs\", \"DiskContainers\": [ { \"Description\": \"Second CLI task\", \"UserBucket\": { \"S3Bucket\": \"my-import-bucket\", \"S3Key\" : \"my-windows-2008-vm-disk1.vmdk\" } }, { \"Description\": \"First CLI task\", \"UserBucket\": { \"S3Bucket\": \"my-import-bucket\", \"S3Key\" : \"my-windows-2008-vm-disk2.vmdk\" } } ] }"

or for importing a single OVA file we can use:

$ aws ec2 import-image --cli-input-json "{  \"Description\": \"Windows 2008 OVA\", \"DiskContainers\": [ { \"Description\": \"First CLI task\", \"UserBucket\": { \"S3Bucket\": \"my-import-bucket\", \"S3Key\" : \"my-windows-2008-vm.ova\" } } ]}"

For more detailed information please refer to:

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ImportVMImportImage.html

We can monitor the import process with:

ec2 describe-import-image-tasks

We are then able to launch an instance of the VM we imported as an AMI:

ec2-run-instances ami-1111111 -k my-key-pair --availability-zone us-east-1a