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VMware's virtual machines to be moved by Amazon to Cloud
By siliconindia
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Saturday, 18 December 2010, 00:59 IST
Bangalore: Amazon Web Services introduces yet another new feature called VM Import, which will enable the movement of essential machine images by the IT departments from their internal data centers to the cloud. The new feature would be particularly useful when the reference is towards migration and disaster recovery. VM Import can handle VMware VMDK (Virtual Machine Disk Format) images of Windows Server 2008 SP2, as reported by Mikael Rickn?s from IDG News Service.
IT departments use Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) is used by the IT departments so as to import images and API tools to point to a virtual machine image in their existing environment. Their next step is the specification of the amount of compute capacity required and where they prefer running the image in Amazon's cloud platform. VM Import then automatically transfers the image file, migrate the image, and create the instance in Amazon's cloud, as explained by Amazon.
To be in a stopped state is a must for the virtual machine before the VMDK image is generated, as is mentioned in an Amazon FAQ. The virtual machine needs to continue working without being paused or suspended. Also, encrypted disks and encrypted image files are not supported.
The size of the disk image and the speed of the network connection determine the time required for the import of a virtual machine. For example, a 10GB image takes about two hours to import over a 10Mbps broadband connection.
Although the conversion process does not charge, the users have to pay for bandwidth for the upload as well as for storage and computing capacity, which are all charged at Amazon's usual rates. Amazon plans to make VM Import compatible with additional operating systems and virtualization platforms. Additional operating systems will include other versions of Windows and Linux. Other virtualization platforms include Microsoft's Hyper-V and Citrix's Xen Server.
