VM Import/Export enables you to easily import virtual machine images from your existing environment to Amazon EC2 instances and export them back to your on-premises environment. This offering allows you to leverage your existing investments in the virtual machines that you have built to meet your IT security, configuration management, and compliance requirements by bringing those virtual machines into Amazon EC2 as ready-to-use instances. You can also export imported instances back to your on-premises virtualization infrastructure, allowing you to deploy workloads across your IT infrastructure.

VM Import/Export is available at no additional charge beyond standard usage charges for Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3.



To import your images, use the AWS CLI or other developer tools to import a virtual machine (VM) image from your VMware environment. If you use the VMware vSphere virtualization platform, you can also use the AWS Management Portal for vCenter to import your VM. As part of the import process, VM Import will convert your VM into an Amazon EC2 AMI, which you can use to run Amazon EC2 instances. Once your VM has been imported, you can take advantage of Amazon’s elasticity, scalability and monitoring via offerings like Auto Scaling, Elastic Load Balancing and CloudWatch to support your imported images.



You can export previously imported EC2 instances using the Amazon EC2 API tools. You simply specify the target instance, virtual machine file format and a destination S3 bucket, and VM Import/Export will automatically export the instance to the S3 bucket. You can then download and launch the exported VM within your on-premises virtualization infrastructure.

You can import Windows and Linux VMs that use VMware ESX or Workstation, Microsoft Hyper-V, and Citrix Xen virtualization formats. And you can export previously imported EC2 instances to VMware ESX, Microsoft Hyper-V or Citrix Xen formats. For a full list of supported operating systems, versions, and formats, please consult the VM Import section of the Amazon EC2 User Guide. We plan to add support for additional operating systems, versions and formats in the future.

