Exporting an instance as a VM using VM Import/Export

Exporting as a VM is useful when you want to deploy a copy of an Amazon EC2 instance in your on-site virtualization environment. You can export most EC2 instances to Citrix Xen, Microsoft Hyper-V, or VMware vSphere.

When you export an instance, you are charged the standard Amazon S3 rates for the bucket where the exported VM is stored. In addition, there might be a small charge for the temporary use of an Amazon EBS snapshot. For more information about Amazon S3 pricing, see Amazon Simple Storage Service Pricing.

Prerequisites

To export a VM from Amazon EC2, first meet the following prerequisites.

• Install the AWS CLI. For more information, see the AWS Command Line Interface User Guide.

• Create an Amazon S3 bucket for storing the exported instances or choose an existing bucket. The bucket must be in the Region where you want export your VMs. For more information, see the Amazon Simple Storage Service Console User Guide.

• Attach an access control list (ACL) to your S3 bucket containing the following grants. For more information, see Managing Access with ACLs in the Amazon Simple Storage Service Developer Guide.

  • For Grantee, provide the appropriate Region-specific canonical account ID:

    Africa (Cape Town)

    3f7744aeebaf91dd60ab135eb1cf908700c8d2bc9133e61261e6c582be6e33ee

    Asia Pacific (Hong Kong)

    97ee7ab57cc9b5034f31e107741a968e595c0d7a19ec23330eae8d045a46edfb

    Asia Pacific (Osaka)

    40f22ffd22d6db3b71544ed6cd00c8952d8b0a63a87d58d5b074ec60397db8c9

    Europe (Milan)

    04636d9a349e458b0c1cbf1421858b9788b4ec28b066148d4907bb15c52b5b9c

    Middle East (Bahrain)

    aa763f2cf70006650562c62a09433f04353db3cba6ba6aeb3550fdc8065d3d9f

    China (Beijing) and China (Ningxia)

    834bafd86b15b6ca71074df0fd1f93d234b9d5e848a2cb31f880c149003ce36f

    AWS GovCloud (US)

    af913ca13efe7a94b88392711f6cfc8aa07c9d1454d4f190a624b126733a5602

    All other Regions

    c4d8eabf8db69dbe46bfe0e517100c554f01200b104d59cd408e777ba442a322

  • READ_ACP permission

  • WRITE permission

Considerations for instance export

Exporting instances and volumes is subject to the following limitations:

• You must export your instances and volumes to one of the following image formats that your virtualization environment supports:

  • Open Virtual Appliance (OVA), which is compatible with VMware vSphere versions 4, 5, and 6.

  • 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.

• You can't export an instance if it contains third-party software provided by AWS. For example, VM Export cannot export Windows or SQL Server instances, or any instance created from an image in the AWS Marketplace.

• You can't export an instance with encrypted EBS snapshots in the block device mapping.

• You can't export an instance with instance store volumes in the block device mapping.

• You can only export EBS volumes that are specified in the block device mapping, not EBS volumes attached after instance launch.

• You can't export an instance launched from an imported image if you deleted the AMI or the EBS snapshot for the AMI. To work around the issue, create an AMI from the instance and export the AMI.

• You can't export an instance that has more than one virtual disk.

• You can't export an instance that has more than one network interface.

• You can't export an instance from Amazon EC2 if you've shared it from another AWS account.

• 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. You cannot export to an S3 bucket encrypted using SSE-KMS.

Start an instance export task

To export your instance, use the create-instance-export-task command. The exported file is written to the specified S3 bucket in the following S3 key: prefixexport-i-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.format (for example, my-export-bucket/vms/export-i-1234567890abcdef0.ova).

aws ec2 create-instance-export-task --instance-id instance-id --target-environment vmware --export-to-s3-task file://C:\file.json

The file file.json is a JSON document that contains the required information.

{
    "ContainerFormat": "ova",
    "DiskImageFormat": "VMDK",
    "S3Bucket": "my-export-bucket",
    "S3Prefix": "vms/"
}

Monitor an instance export task

To monitor the export of your instance, use the following describe-export-tasks command:

aws ec2 describe-export-tasks --export-task-ids export-i-1234567890abcdef0

Cancel an instance export task

If you need to, you can use the following cancel-export-task command to cancel the export of an instance that is in progress.

aws ec2 cancel-export-task --export-task-id export-i-1234567890abcdef0

This command removes all artifacts of the export, including any partially created Amazon S3 objects. If the export task is complete or is in the process of transferring the final disk image, the command fails and returns an error.