AWS tool simplifies VMware import process
Amazon Web Services has released a tool to simplify the importing of VMware virtual machines into its infrastructure.
The Amazon EC2 VM Import Connector, which Amazon Web Services (AWS) released on Thursday, is a virtual appliance (vApp) plug-in for VMware's virtual machine management suite VMware VCentre, which sits on top of VMware's virtualisation platform vSphere.
With the Import Connector, virtual machines from a VMware vSphere infrastructure can be imported into the AWS cloud via a graphical user interface.
The tool can be downloaded from the AWS Developer Tools page. After it has been installed and configured, virtual machines which run Windows Server 2008 SP2 (either 32 or 64 bit), are currently turned off and use a single virtual hard drive of one terabyte or less can be imported into the AWS cloud.
The vApp builds on AWS's existing import feature for VMware, VM Import, which it announced in December 2010. VM Import allowed VMware images to be brought into the AWS cloud via VM Import APIs or command line tools.
In the future, AWS has plans to allow customers to create and export a virtual machine image of an Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance or Amazon Machine Image (AMI) and to broaden support to other operating systems, AWS wrote in a blog post. AWS did not give dates of availability for these features, but said their release was "getting closer every day".
VMware is not the only virtualisation platform that AWS is building additional tools for. In January, the company announced that it was working with Citrix to increase interoperability between Xen-virtualised infrastructures and the AWS cloud.