vTeardown

The popularity of on-demand IT services in the public cloud is increasing around the world at a phenomenal rate. One of the reasons why the adoption rate with public clouds is so high is due to its ease of use. I recently had the opportunity to test the functionality of a public cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offering and found it quite easy to use. So straightforward that I could register for an account and launch a bunch of Windows 2003 and 2008 instances all within ten minutes.

So now what? I basically started by registering an account with Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) and created a Windows environment in the cloud that would have taken me days if I were to provision them on physical servers back at my local data center. If I were a startup with little computing resources available, this option would definitely look quite appealing. I could setup my whole test environment within minutes and not even have to provision a single physical server. Initially, this all seems quite efficient but as I thought about the future from the customer’s perspective, what happens if their company decides one day to host their own applications in-house or at their local data center? Or what if budget is scarce and they no longer can afford Amazon EC2 pricing? Or what if one of their developers wants to test something on an EC2 instance but does not have access to the Internet? One of the main concerns with IaaS cloud platforms is virtual machine mobility. Once a customer deploys a virtual machine in the cloud, how do they get it out of the cloud?

Since Amazon EC2 virtual machines do not have a mobile, encapsulated virtual disk file similar to VMware’s Virtual Machine Disk Format (VMDK), customers simply cannot easily import and export virtual disk files. Technically, it is possible but it either requires purchasing additional third-party software or scripting complex Linux commands to process and convert EC2 files. If you are a Windows administrator, I’m sure you would want the easiest way possible.

To help in this situation, VMware just released a Knowledge Base article on how to convert EC2 Windows instances into VMware format using VMware vCenter Converter Standalone, which is available as a free download. The KB is available here: http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1018015. Do note that users should ensure that they have properly licensed their Windows virtual machines after exporting them from EC2.

This solution means users can now take a Windows instance from EC2 and run it locally on their desktop using VMware Workstation or one of VMware’s freely available hosted virtualization platforms, VMware Player or VMware Server. In addition, once converted, they have the option to migrate their virtual machines over to VMware vSphere or to simply upload the virtual disk to a VMware vCloud Express service provider. VMware vCloud Express is an IaaS offering delivered by VMware service provider partners which offers flexible, high-performance on-demand computing giving customers the power and control to configure resources exactly the way they want them.

Most users will find locked-down IaaS platforms like EC2 to be too restrictive, but users that initially started with EC2 because of its ease of creating virtual machines now have an escape route to more flexible VMware-based virtualization and cloud platforms.