oel7.1-x86_64-virtualbox.box is a valid name.ĭisplays progress statistics. s3key is optional but if you omit it, vboxfile expect a certain naming convention like osdistroVER-othermetadata.box For example. The s3bucket and the (temporary) key used for uploading the VM. Currently only virtualbox providers are supported. The above steps can be tedious and since I needed to import vagrant boxes, I created a tool to automate this: Remember to deregister and clean up the associated snapshot id for the temporary AMI created by import-image.

Yum install -y cloud-init cloud-utils-growpart dracut-modules-growrootĬat >/etc/cloud/cloud.cfg -source-region -source-image-id -name 'My new OS' -description 'Details of the AMI' RedHat based distributions include cloud-utils in the EPEL repo the following script can be used to configure the expected login user as ec2-user: Your vbox needs to have cloud-init installed and configured. With the prerequisites satisfied the process is:

Fast upstream bandwidth as you will be uploading the image to s3!.

If you are an IAM AWS user (as opposed to root user) you also need to attach the following inline policy.

A vmimport service role and a policy attached to it, precisely as explained in this AWS doc.

Define an s3 bucket (in a region close to you, to speed up uploads.) This will be used to upload the images for conversion to AMI.

pv requires more steps such as installing a pv enabled kernel.

The produced AMIs are suitable for HVM virtualization.

vmdk artifacts and vagrant boxes (.box format) In this article I am focusing on virtualbox.

Virtualization engine that can produce.

It turns out that this is possible using AWS ImportImage. It would be great if we could create our customized OS image either through an interactive installation or in an automated way via Packer and import it as an AMI in EC2.

Some times though there is a need to create an AMI from an existing virtualization source e.g.

Those AMIs can be used as a basis for customized AMIs, generated for example using the excellent packer amazon-ebs builder. For example the ones owned by Amazon can be searched per region usingĪws -region eu-central-1 ec2 describe-images -owner amazon There are a large number of publicly available AMIs. Continuing the trend of AWS-related articles, this time I am looking at how to generate an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) from an ISO source.

Converting vmdk to iso