Many organisations are used to using virtualisation in-house probably from the use of VMWare. Often the organisational need is to move an existing virtualised application hosted on VMWare to a cloud provider, such as EC2. If this is your scenario, standards won’t help but you can still achieve what you need to do. The basic steps to do this are:

1.    Shut down the existing VMWare image

2.    Grab a copy of QEMU which you can use to convert the image.

3.    The VMDK file will then be converted into a RAW file

4.    As this is a RAW image it should be bootable by a local Xen, QEMU or KVM installation.

5.    Now you need to bundle this into an AMI using ‘ec2-bundle-image’

6.    Lastly you need to upload the bundled image and register it in EC2.

7.    The AMI will appear when you request a list of your images

We’ve done this for quite a few clients now and it is a relatively straight forward process.