EC2 instance image on VirtualBOX?

Question

Is there any way of getting the saved EC2 instance image and running it on virtualbox on my personal computer?

There's a link on [this question](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21920993/convert-amazon-ec2-ami-to-virtual-or-vagrant-box) describing how to [manually copy the filesystems into VM disks](http://smashingboxes.com/ideas/how-to-convert-ec2-ami-to-vmdk-for-vagrant). This technique may be helpful if you did not create the instance by importing a virtual machine, and this cannot use the official way. — John Walthour, May 22 '15 at 17:21

score 7 · Answer 1 · answered Feb 12 '14 at 16:22

The official way is only if it was originally imported into EC2

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ExportingEC2Instances.html

If you have previously imported an instance into Amazon EC2, you can use the command line tools to export that instance to Citrix Xen, Microsoft Hyper-V, or VMware vSphere. Exporting an instance can be useful when you want to deploy a copy of your EC2 instance in your on-site virtualization environment.

You cannot export an instance unless it was previously imported into AWS

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Oct 16 '13 at 20:58

2

it looks like you can directly import/export ec2 and virtualbox/vmware images.

http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/vmimport/

answered Oct 16 '13 at 20:58

adkatrit

143
1
6

1

This is only available to instances which used the vm import feature previously. You can't export AMI based instances using this. – James V Jun 11 '14 at 02:21

score 2 · Answer 3 · answered May 12 '16 at 00:56

The amazon tool is very restrictive. But you can dump your EBS, download it and make a VDI image out of it. I have done it with two of my EC2 instances and described the steps on my blog.

http://diogomelo.net/blog/16/export-amazon-ec2-instance-to-virtualbox

EC2 instance image on VirtualBOX?

3 Answers3