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Exporting An Amazon EC2 Instance To Run On vSphere

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I attended the Silicon Valley VMUG yesterday and there was an interesting question that was brought up at the end of Joe Sarabia's Software Defined Datacenter session (which was great BTW, folks stayed past the end and this was during lunch!). The question from the attendee was how to export an Amazon EC2 Instance and run that on an vSphere ESXi host? Joe's answer was that there is not a tool from VMware but there should be some 3rd party tools out there that could help with this task.

This was not something I had really thought about before since I do not use Amazon EC2 and of course that perked my curiosity. I assumed importing and exporting Instances to and from Amazon EC2 would be just as easy as it is on VMware vSphere. To export a VM in vSphere, you simply select the VM and then Export which can be outputted to either an OVF or OVA format.

After a quick search on Amazon's EC2 website, I found that you can export an EC2 Instance by using EC2 API Tools. So I went ahead and deployed both a Linux and Windows Instance and ran through the installation of the EC2 API Tools on my Mac OS X system at home. I tried to export the Linux Instance and it threw an error saying not supported which I thought was odd and then tried the Windows Instance and it threw another interesting error:

Client.NotExportable: Only imported instances can be exported.

My initial thought was that I must have done something wrong. I dug a bit more into Amazon's documentation which was not very easy to find and finally found the Exporting EC2 Instance documentation. It turns out there are a few "caveats" if you want to export an EC2 Instance:

Only the following operating systems are supported:

  • Windows Server 2003 R2 (Standard, Enterprise, and Datacenter)
  • Windows Server 2008 (Standard, Enterprise, and Datacenter)
  • Windows Server 2008 R2 (Standard, Enterprise, and Datacenter)

This meant that you could not export any of your Linux Instances. In addition, these Instances must be uploaded by the user initially for them to be eligible for export. I also found there were several other export limitations:

  • You cannot export Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) data volumes.
  • You cannot export an instance that has more than one virtual disk.
  • You cannot export an instance that has more than one network interface.

I was actually quite surprised to see how difficult and restrictive Amazon has made it for exporting their EC2 Instances, I really thought it would have been just as easy as it is on VMware vSphere. I also came across this VMware KB 1018015 which provides an alternative to the EC2 API Tools, which has you install VMware Converter on the Windows system to export the EC2 Instance.

Installing ESXi 5.1 Update 1 on Mac Mini is Now a Breeze! (No Custom ISO/patches Needed!)

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ESXi 5.1 Update 1 was just released by VMware and similar to the ESXi 5.0 Update 2 release last year, the tg3 (Broadcom) driver has now been updated to 3.123b.v50.1 which is required to support network connectivity on the Apple Mac Mini's. Prior to this, to install ESXi on an Apple Mac Mini, users were required to build a custom ISO that included the updated tg3 driver and I am happy to say this is no long necessary! In addition, having the latest driver also provides out of the box support for the Thunderbolt ethernet adapter which is great if you are looking to add an additional ethernet connection to the Apple Mac Mini.

Disclaimer: The Apple Mac Mini is not officially supported by VMware.

Here is a quick screenshot of the networking details including the Thunderbolt ethernet adapter on my Apple Mac Mini 5,3 running ESXi 5.1 Update 1:

Apple Mac Mini 6,2 Users

If you have an Apple Mac Mini 6,2 the workarounds described in this article are still required as well as an additional issue regarding the on-board NIC for the Apple Mac Mini 6,2. The issue is that the on-board NIC is not recognized and claimed by the tg3 driver because there is not a PCI ID entry in the tg3 map file. Note, BCM57766 driver is supported, just that it was missing the mapping (I believe this was the case in 5.0 as well). Working with VMware engineering, I was able to obtain the SMC fix and along with the workarounds that I built earlier for ESXi 5.0 and I have created a custom ESXi 5.1 Update 1 ISO that includes all the fixes and you will be able to install it on your Apple Mac Mini 6,2 without any further modifications.

Download: ESXi-5.1u1-MacMini-SMC-BOOT-FIX-6-2.iso

Note: From my understanding, some of these issues have been fixed but just did not make it in time for the Update 1 release. I'm hoping that we will be able to get most of these fixed in a future patch or update. This is actually pretty awesome, given that this is NOT SUPPORTED by VMware, but engineers are still willing to help the community out!

UPDATE: When trying to enable vSphere HA, the following error "Could not find a trusted signer" is thrown. To get around this problem, you will need to manually install the vSphere HA VIB and then reconfigure vSphere HA. The easiest method is to SCP the VIB from the VCSA and then using ESXCLI and the --no-sig-check flag to install the VIB.

Here are the commands to run:

scp /etc/vmware-vpx/docRoot/vSphere-HA-depot/vib20/vmware-fdm/VMware_bootbank_vmware-fdm_5.1.0-1064983.vib [email protected]:/tmp
esxcli software vib install -v /tmp/VMware_bootbank_vmware-fdm_5.1.0-1064983.vib --no-sig-check

Additional Resources:

The New vinternals.com (The Y Hacker News Of Virtualization)

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vinternals.com was just re-launched today by Stu Radnidge ‏(no stranger to the Virtualization community) but instead of a blog as most have come to know that URL, Stu has created something even cooler in my opinion. If you are familiar with how Y Hacker News, Reddit or even sites like Digg work, Stu is basically doing the same thing but for Virtualization-related topics. It is a news website that is completely driven by the community through the submission of either a link or a question. These entries can then be voted on by the community and the top 100 current entries will be displayed on the home page.

I think most will agree that there is already too much information out there today in various forms such as: Blogs, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Socialcast, Forums, Google+, Email, Distribution Lists, RSS Feeds, etc. and having yet another place to go for information is not going to help. The reason I think this is a pretty neat idea (if successful) for the Virtualization community is that there is a wealth of information out there, why not leverage the community as a whole help surface up useful or interesting content for everyone to benefit?

Many times there are useful bits of information or articles that are not shared through the traditional channels or more often not getting enough visibility before it's lost among the cloud of information. Hopefully with a solution like this, top quality content will be surfaced to the top and significantly help reduce the number of places you need to go for your virtualization-related news.

You will notice the look and feel of vinternals is very similar to Y Hacker News:

The other really neat thing about Stu's site is that there are no passwords to manage. When you sign up, an email with a login link is provided and everything is done using cookies. After you login, you will be able to view the current entries on the home page and if you wish to submit a link or a question, just click on the Submit button at the top.

The input is pretty straight forward: A URL, title for a link or pose a question and click on submit. To vote for an entry, you just click on the green caret icon next to each entry. If you would like to learn more about the new the vinternals site and how it works, you can read about it here. 

I am looking forward to seeing more entries submitted by the community, Great job Stu! BTW - You need an RSS feed 😉

If you are not signed up, what are you waiting for? Go here to sign up now!