Migrate Your Existing OnPremise Workloads to Amazon EC2

Using VM Import migrate your existing VM-based applications and preserve the software and settings that you have configured in your existing VM.

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0. Prerequisites

   • OnPremise VM (Preferably in VMWare / Virtualbox)
     • If you have *.vmdk image of your VM that will also be enough
     • MUST: You should have the uid/password to log into this VM
   • AWS CLI with access to Administrator privileges
     • You can tighten it down based on your requirements

1. Export VM & Upload to S3

   Depending on virtualization tool, use the appropriate procedure to export your VM into *.vmdk or *.ova image. Upload the image to S3 Bucket and note down the bucket_name and vm_image_name.

2. Global Customization Variables

   bucket_name="n-backup"
   # Add the appropriate S3 Prefix to the VM Image
   vm_image_name="VM-Import/vCentOS7-disk002.vmdk"
   

3. Create Trust Policy

   Create the IAM trust policy json with the name trust-policy.json

   
   cat > "trust-policy.json" << "EOF"
   {
      "Version": "2012-10-17",
      "Statement": [
         {
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Principal": { "Service": "vmie.amazonaws.com" },
            "Action": "sts:AssumeRole",
            "Condition": {
               "StringEquals":{
                  "sts:Externalid": "vmimport"
               }
            }
         }
      ]
   }
   EOF
   

4. Create the IAM Role for VM Import

   Ensure that you create the role with the name vmimport. Use the trust policy created in the previous step

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

5. Create the IAM Policy: role-policy.json

   This policy will be attached to the role vmimport created in the previous step. The bucket name is picked up from the global variable.

   echo '{
      "Version":"2012-10-17",
      "Statement":[
         {
            "Effect":"Allow",
            "Action":[
               "s3:GetBucketLocation",
               "s3:GetObject",
               "s3:ListBucket" 
            ],
            "Resource":[
               "arn:aws:s3:::'${bucket_name}'",
               "arn:aws:s3:::'${bucket_name}'/*"
            ]
         },
         {
            "Effect":"Allow",
            "Action":[
               "ec2:ModifySnapshotAttribute",
               "ec2:CopySnapshot",
               "ec2:RegisterImage",
               "ec2:Describe*"
            ],
            "Resource":"*"
         }
      ]
   }
   ' | sudo tee role-policy.json
   

6. Attach policy to IAM Role:vmimport

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

7. Begin VM Image Import Task

   The following command will begin the import of the VM Image. The S3 Bucket name & Bucket Key is picked up from the global variables.

   # Set the metadata, 
   echo '[
     {
       "Description": "centosv7",
       "Format": "vmdk",
       "UserBucket": {
           "S3Bucket": "'${bucket_name}'",
           "S3Key": "'${vm_image_name}'"
       }
   }]
   ' > containers.json
   

   Begin VM Import

   aws ec2 import-image --description "centosv7" --disk-containers "file://containers.json"
   

   The expected output,

   {
       "Description": "centosv7",
       "ImportTaskId": "import-ami-0d6db3a35d431e4e3",
       "Progress": "2",
       "SnapshotDetails": [
           {
               "DiskImageSize": 0.0,
               "Format": "VMDK",
               "UserBucket": {
                   "S3Bucket": "n-backup",
                   "S3Key": "VM-Import/vCentOS7-disk002.vmdk"
               }
           }
       ],
       "Status": "active",
       "StatusMessage": "pending"
   }
   

   Note down the ImportTaskId to check the progress of the import job.

   Check status of VM Import Jobs

   aws ec2 describe-import-image-tasks --import-task-ids "import-ami-0d6db3a35d431e4e3"
   

   Check VM Import Progress

   # VM Image being updated to AMI
   [root:tmp]# aws ec2 describe-import-image-tasks --import-task-ids "import-ami-0d6db3a35d431e4e3"
   {
       "ImportImageTasks": [
           {
               "Description": "centosv7",
               "ImportTaskId": "import-ami-0d6db3a35d431e4e3",
               "Progress": "30",
               "SnapshotDetails": [
                   {
                       "Description": "centosv7",
                       "DiskImageSize": 931182592.0,
                       "Format": "VMDK",
                       "Status": "completed",
                       "UserBucket": {
                           "S3Bucket": "n-backup",
                           "S3Key": "VM-Import/vCentOS7-disk002.vmdk"
                       }
                   }
               ],
               "Status": "active",
               "StatusMessage": "updating"
           }
       ]
   }
   

   Completion Status

   [root:tmp]# aws ec2 describe-import-image-tasks --import-task-ids "import-ami-0d6db3a35d431e4e3"
   {
       "ImportImageTasks": [
           {
               "Architecture": "x86_64",
               "Description": "centosv7",
               "ImageId": "ami-0da97e2296167b5ca",
               "ImportTaskId": "import-ami-0d6db3a35d431e4e3",
               "LicenseType": "BYOL",
               "Platform": "Linux",
               "SnapshotDetails": [
                   {
                       "Description": "centosv7",
                       "DeviceName": "/dev/sda1",
                       "DiskImageSize": 931182592.0,
                       "Format": "VMDK",
                       "SnapshotId": "snap-0dc6d32a5924b22c7",
                       "Status": "completed",
                       "UserBucket": {
                           "S3Bucket": "n-backup",
                           "S3Key": "VM-Import/vCentOS7-disk002.vmdk"
                       }
                   }
               ],
               "Status": "completed"
           }
       ]
   }
   

8. Launch New EC2

   Once you launch the VM, you can login using the same uid/password you used onpremise. Typically in real-world you will clean this before the import task and setup SSH key-based authentication

Support

Please open a GitHub issue.

Feedback

Please open a GitHub issue. I encourage you to contribute your changes and send me pull request.

References

1. AWS CLI - import-image

2. AWS Blogs - Importing a VM