# Considerations for image export


Exporting images and volumes is subject to the following limitations:
+ You must export to one of the following image formats that your virtualization environment supports:
  + Virtual Hard Disk (VHD), which is compatible with Citrix Xen and Microsoft Hyper-V virtualization products.
  + Stream-optimized ESX Virtual Machine Disk (VMDK), which is compatible with VMware ESX and VMware vSphere versions 4, 5, and 6.
  + Raw format.
+ The base AMI used to launch an instance must exist when you attempt to export the instance. If you have deleted the AMI, the export fails.
+ VM Import/Export only supports exporting VMs to an S3 bucket in the same AWS account that you export them from.
+ Export operations do not support hybrid configurations. GRUB2 must be enabled for either BIOS or UEFI, but it can't be enabled for both.
+ You can't export an image if it contains third-party software provided by AWS. For example, VM Export cannot export Windows or SQL Server images, or any image created from an image in the AWS Marketplace.
+ You can't export an image with encrypted EBS snapshots in the block device mapping.
+ You can only export EBS data volumes that are specified in the block device mapping, not EBS volumes attached after instance launch.
+ You can't export an image from Amazon EC2 if you've shared it from another AWS account.
+ You can't have multiple export image tasks in progress for the same AMI at the same time.
+ By default, you can't have more than 5 conversion tasks per Region in progress at the same time. This limit is adjustable up to 20.
+ VMs with volumes larger than 1 TiB are not supported.
+ You can export a volume to either an unencrypted S3 bucket or to a bucket encrypted using SSE-S3 encryption. You cannot export to an S3 bucket encrypted using SSE-KMS encryption.