If you still have access to the instance, I believe the simplest way would be using "dd" to copy it off to a raw file (possibly just directly piping over SSH to the destination system like in ssh your.ec2-syst.em 'dd if=/dev/sdh bs=1M | gzip' | gunzip | dd of=/tmp/ec2-image.raw) and then using something like qemu-img to convert the raw image to a VMDK file.
These instructions are ok to mount it locally, but not to RUN it locally. This is much more hard to achieve. This post seems to show a way to do this, even if grub instructions are not very clear to a novice as I am.
The author of this other post is much more skeptic about the ease to do this process and suggest to build up the server from scratch.
This post clarifies step by step how to mount the AMI locally, but doesn't solve the booting issues.
If you still have access to the instance, I believe the simplest way would be using "dd" to copy it off to a raw file (possibly just directly piping over SSH to the destination system like in
ssh your.ec2-syst.em 'dd if=/dev/sdh bs=1M | gzip' | gunzip | dd of=/tmp/ec2-image.raw) and then using something like qemu-img to convert the raw image to a VMDK file.These instructions are ok to mount it locally, but not to RUN it locally. This is much more hard to achieve. This post seems to show a way to do this, even if grub instructions are not very clear to a novice as I am.
The author of this other post is much more skeptic about the ease to do this process and suggest to build up the server from scratch.
This post clarifies step by step how to mount the AMI locally, but doesn't solve the booting issues.
Hope this helps!