Monthly Archives: August 2010

Converting from VirtualBox or VMWare to EC2 now Easier than Ever

5 Replies

The new PV-Grub ability introduced by Amazon for EC2 has opened the door for more than just custom kernels, it also makes it a lot easier to turn VirtualBox and VMWare instances into EC2 instances. In the past I have written about transfering VirtualBox images to Xen but to do that with EC2 required a matching kernel exist for your VirtualBox installed OS that was blessed by Amazon. With PV-Grub as long as you can get a kernel for your existing system that is compatible with the EC2 infrastructure you can transfer it. A lot of the most popular distributions already have compatible kernels so that shouldn't be an issue and if you had to you could always compile the kernel by hand.

Some of what follows is exactly the same as my post about installing CentOS 5.5 on EC2 with the stock kernel. Once you get the hang of it you can install just about anything Linux based to EC2. I've broken this post into two parts to try and separate the generic transfer information from the specifics of an example. The first part that goes over the basics of what needs to be done to transfer any VirtualBox or VMWare box to EC2. The second part is an example of transferring an Ubuntu Server install to from VirtualBox to EC2.

Continue reading →

Installing Cent OS 5.5 on EC2 with the Cent OS 5.5 Kernel

24 Replies

Amazon recently introduced the ability to boot a custom kernel using pv-grub on EC2. This opens the door for all kinds of interesting ideas that I've been thinking about for a while, like seeing if I can boot right into a web server and skip all that extra junk that comes with Linux distributions, but that is just me. The main door it is going to open for most people interested in EC2 will be the ability to upgrade the kernel that comes with their distribution. That brings us to how to install Cent OS 5.5 on EC2 and use the kernel that is part of the distribution.

For those who might just be interested in booting a custom kernel using EC2 pv-grub I will try to produce a few more posts with more details on that but for now here are the main things to know:

  • The pv-grup kernels named with hd00 will look on the first partition of the registered device in the /boot/boot/grub directory for a menu.lst file. Use this type of kernel if you create want to use a partitioned disk.
  • The pv-grup kernels named with hd0 will look on the registered device in the /boot/grub directory for a menu.lst file. Use this type of kernel if you don't have a partition on your disk.
  • You won't get anything meaningful back from the boot attempt if your grub menu.lst file is in the wrong place or is not valid. See the end of the post for what a pv-grub error message looks like and some tips on what to do if you see it.
  • The kernel you use does matter but the current mainline Linux kernel (2.6.35) contains everything you need except for a small change to turn off XSAVE. The main thing to know is that not every distribution may have made the change needed to work on EC2.
  • I have tried non-Linux kernels to no avail. See the end of the post for a little more information.

Continue reading →