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Mayank
Asked: 2012-01-05 22:18:58 +0800 CST

Creating you own FreeBSD ami in EC2

  • 772

I'm running XVM on my laptop. XVM has got FreeBSD installed with all the required ports to run APACHE/PHP.

I want this .vdi file to be imported into an EC2 instance.

  • Is it possible to import a virtual OS to Amazon EC2?
  • If yes, does it get all the libs installed and DBs created or just OS?
  • Could somebody please share pointers/hints on how to do this!

Any help is much appreciated :)

amazon-ec2 virtualbox freebsd

4 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Short answer, no – you should use one of the available AMI's for FreeBSD. Each signed release announcement (e.g. 11.2R) has the list of AMIs for each region. If you prefer to run a STABLE or CURRENT snapshot, subscribe to the freebsd-snapshots mailing list (low volume) and find the AMIs in each snapshot announcement (e.g. stable/11 from mid-September 2018).

    Prior to appearing in those locations, you would have found status on Colin Percival's site. Colin is the driving force behind getting FreeBSD working well on EC2.

    Use one of the project-supplied AMIs and customize it.

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  2. Just in case here are some scripts to create a FreeBSD + ZFS on root:

    https://github.com/fabrik-red/images/blob/master/fabrik.sh

    Or you can just use the image: https://github.com/fabrik-red/images/releases

    More about it can be found in https://fabrik.red

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  3. Short answer, no but the long one is yes (it's other question is it supported). This is the procedure that I have used to create my machine (with pfSence):

    Prepare your machine:

    1. Install your OS on Virtualbox
    2. Configure it, so it will boot without asking any questions
    3. Enable SSH
    4. Configure user that is able to access this machine by SSH

    Create image:

    1. Start new linux machine on Virtualbox
    2. Attach the HDD of the first machine to this new linux machine (be careful because VB has created snapshot for me - so on second image creation your changes may not be there)
    3. Start this new linux machine
    4. Use dd to make raw image of the HDD of the first machine

    Upload on AWS (for this you will need older version of AWS CLI)

    1. Install old version of AWS cli (it require JAVA)
    2. Upload the volume ./ec2-import-volume /tmp/image.raw -f raw -z us-east-1a -b BUCKET_NAME -O XXXXXXX -W XXXXXXX -o XXXXXX -w XXXXXXX /tmp/dell_chrome/pfSence/image.raw - this is the raw image BUCKET_NAME - this is the bucket name in us-east-1
    3. Check the status ./ec2-describe-conversion-tasks -O XXXXXXXXX -W XXXXXXXX
    4. Once the volume has been created (task completed) create a snapshot, this can be done from the web interface
    5. Once the snapshot has been created, create an image
    6. After creating the image and status is “available” it should be ready to be launched, once the image boot do the proper adjustments based on your needs.

    Thank you @nbari I saw the most important thing - uploading the volume in your site.

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  4. Another advice is to try using another IaaS cloud provider.

    Some vendors (e.g CloudSigma or ElasticHosts) running KVM hypervisor do provide scripts to migrate your OS virtual machine including FreeBSD.

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