AWS Virtual Machine Import/Export Tool

by Martin Noble
31 May 2012

Does your company use a virtual machine environment?

You may be interested to learn that Amazon- one of the leading cloud hosting services - will now allow you to import and export your virtual machines using a simple tool that does all the work for you. Best of all there are no charges associated with these tools, though the usual AWS charges still apply of course.

Amazon's VM Import/Export Tool

Using Amazon’s VM Import/Export tools will enable you to easily import virtual machine images from your existing environment to Amazon EC2 as “instances” and also export them back to your on-premises environment again.

Benefits

This feature provides a potential use as part of a disaster recovery plan. Images of your virtual machines can be stored on the cloud then, should the worst happen, they can be quickly launched as EC2 instances when needed.

Of course this process is entirely dependent on your Internet connection, those using ADSL may find the upload times are just not worth considering.

Further reading

As always, more information can be found by browsing the AWS site.

Article by James Reynolds, IT Support Senior Technician.