Bundling a Windows AMI

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud: 2009-03-01

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Bundling a Windows AMI

This section describes how to bundle an AMI in Windows. The bundling process does the following:

  • Compresses the image to minimize bandwidth usage and storage requirements

  • Encrypts and signs the compressed image to ensure confidentiality and authenticates the image against its creator

  • Splits the encrypted image into manageable parts for upload

  • Runs sysprep to strip out computer specific information (e.g., the MAC address and computer name) to prepare the Windows image for virtualization

  • Creates a manifest file that contains a list of the image parts with their checksums

[Note] Note

Before bundling an instance, you can configure the instance using the EC2Config service. For more information, see Windows Configuration Service

During bundling, only the root store (C:\) is bundled. Data on other instance stores is not preserved.

Bundling an AMI

Bundling your own AMIs allows you to make the most of Amazon EC2. Your AMIs become the basic unit of deployment which allow you to rapidly boot new custom instances as you need them.

All AMIs are loaded from Amazon S3 storage. You must upload the AMI to an existing account on Amazon S3.

Amazon S3 stores data objects in buckets, which are similar in concept to directories. You will need to specify a bucket name in the following example as <your-s3-bucket>. Buckets have globally unique names and are owned by unique users. If you have used Amazon S3 before, you can use any of your existing buckets or just give ec2-bundle-instance any name that makes sense to you. The ec2-bundle-instance utility uploads the bundled AMI to a specified bucket. If the specified bucket does not exist, it creates it. If the specified bucket belongs to another user, ec2-bundle-instance fails, and you have to try a different name.

For this, you will need your AWS Access Key ID (<aws-access-key-id>) and AWS Secret Access Key (<aws-secret-access-key>).

To bundle an AMI

  1. Log in to the Windows instance and make any desired changes.

    [Note] Note

    We highly recommend that you change the password of the AMI. If you use the Amazon EC2-provided password, write it down so you can access instances launched from this AMI. You cannot get the password of new instances using the ec2-get-password command.

  2. If you want to reduce your startup time, delete any temporary files on your instance using the Disk Cleanup tool, defragment your system using Disk Defragmenter, and zero out free space using sdelete -c C:\.

    [Note] Note

    The sdelete utility is available from the sdelete Download Page or the Microsoft Web Site.

  3. On the host where you have installed the API tools, enter the following command:

    PROMPT> ec2-bundle-instance <instance_id> -b <bucket_name> -p <bundle_name> -o <access_key_id> -w <secret_access_key>

    The <instance_id> is the name of the instance, <bucket_name> is the name of the bucket in which to store the AMI, and <bundle_name> is the common name for the files to store in Amazon S3.

    Amazon EC2 shuts down the instance, saves it as an AMI, and restarts it. You can launch copies of the AMI at any time in the future.

Example 

PROMPT> ec2-bundle-instance i-eb977f82 -b mybucket -p myimage -o AKIADQKE4SARGYLE -w eW91dHViZS5jb20vd2F0Y2g/dj1SU3NKMTlzeTNKSQ==
BUNDLE  bun-e3a4418a   i-eb977f82      mybucket myimage 2008-10-02T09:31:44+0000  2008-10-02T09:31:44+0000        pending

Monitoring a Bundled AMI

Before you launch an AMI, you must wait for the bundling to complete and then register it. The bundling task moves from the "pending" state, to the "bundling" state, to the "storing" state, and finally to the "complete" state.

To view the status

  • Enter the following command:

                    PROMPT> 
                
                  ec2-describe-bundle-tasks

    Amazon EC2 returns output similar to the following:

                    BUNDLE  bun-e3a4418a    eb977f82      mybucket     winami   complete        2008-08-28T00:59:13+0000        2008-08-28T01:34:30+0000

Registering the AMI

Your must register your image with Amazon EC2, so we can locate it and run instances based on it.

[Note] Note

If you make any changes to the source image stored in Amazon S3, you must re-register the image.

To register the AMI that Amazon EC2 created and uploaded to Amazon S3

  • Execute the following command:

    PROMPT> ec2-register <your-s3-bucket>/sampleimage.manifest.xml
IMAGE ami-2bb65342

    Amazon EC2 returns an AMI identifier, the value next to the IMAGE tag (ami-2bb65342 in the example) that you can use to run instances.

Migrating a Windows AMI

To move an AMI between regions, you must use the ec2-migrate-image API tool.

To migrate an AMI

  • Execute the following command:

    $ ec2-migrate-image --cert certificate --privatekey key -o AIDADH4IGTRXXKCD -w eW91dHViZS5jb20vd2F0Y2g/dj1SU3NKMTlzeTNKSQ== --bucket source_bucket --destination-bucket target_bucket --manifest manifest --location location

    Amazon EC2 returns the status of the migration.

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