How to change AMI on same instance - amazon-ec2

I have a free micro instance launched in AWS EC2, I want to change the instance's OS to Cent OS. How would I be able to change the AMI <- (OS Image) of the instance?
Edit (Solved):
Terminated existing instance and launched a new one.

You cannot update the AMI on an existing instance in AWS. The only way to do that is to terminate the current instance and relaunch the instances with the desired the AMI
Background
AMI is a special type of virtual appliance that is used to instantiate (create) a virtual machine within the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud ("EC2") and I always refer to it as .iso image file.
Now I can use an .iso image file of a particular OS say Ubuntu to install it on a partition of my choice and if I want to change the OS on that partition then only way for me to do is by formatting that partition and installing a new OS from its .iso image file.

Related

How to access files stored in Virtual Machine from Host

I have a Mac OS X (10.11) virtual machine. But it has stopped working. It just about finishes loading the virtual machine and then just freezes on a black screen. Anyway, I wanna know if there is a way for me to recover the files on that virtual machine (Specifically Xcode files). They were not part of the shared folders so I'm not sure how to access them from the host (which is a windows 10).
One way to do this is to do the following:
Create another virtual machine with Ubuntu
Attached the virtual disk image (.vdi) or whichever format you chose to store the OSX image as a second HDD to the Ubuntu VM.
Follow these instructions to enable HFS+ read write in the Ubuntu virual image.
Another way to do it would be to use something like Arsenal Image mounter which supports direct mounting of a bunch of virtual image formats including VDI, VHD etc.

How to create an Amazon harware virtual machine (HVM) AMI from scratch?

All the instructions I find online start with an existing AMI, but I would like to create an AMI (Amazon Machine Image) from scratch using HVM (Hardware virtual machine) instead of PV (Paravirtualazation).
I would like to build or create new HVM AMI for montavista linux.
I did not find any existing public AMI available for montavista linux operating system.
SO i need to create new HVM-AMI from scratch. Could you please anyone share the process of creating HVM AMI or point to existing AMI for montavista linux if available.

Create vagrant box from existing OS

Is it possible to create vagrant box using working PC or server?
lets say I am running ubuntu 12.04. It contains variety of software (with different versions)
Can I create a vagrant box using that. I mean create vagrant box using existing PC.
Not downloading from anywhere. just make a copy of current OS and share with others.
then others can boot up same copy of my pc
It is possible by creating a physical to virtual image of your current machine. After that you need to import that image into your provider and create Vagrant box.
See this answer for more details.

Own linux image on EC2

I need to install linux from existing VMware VMDK on EC2. For first time I can do this manually, later I will need to do this in automated way.
Could you please help me with link to relevant documentation. Also any tips and experiences are welcome.
Why do I need this?
At my company developers and QA are running our PHP apps on a virtual machine hosted on local machine. We want to move these virtual machines to the cloud, so each developer can easily set up a sandbox in simple web interface.
Amazon does not officially support importing Linux. However, an article from 2008 claims it can be done. If you try this, note this URL as well.
Finally, an AWS employee posted this too:
You can use ec2-import-volume to turn a local disk in a RAW, VMDK or VHD file format into an EBS volume in EC2. This turns a full disk, with MBR, into an EBS disk. If the guest is PV, with the Xen PV drivers installed, you could take a snapshot and create an AMI from that snapshot, inserting the correct AKI.
Follow the instructions of creating your own AMI. Also check out the following articles on EBS volumes: article1, article2. Here's some steps on how to create EBS-backed AMI instance.
You will have to manually create your own images. The ec2 api tools do not support linux/esxi 5 images. I just found out after spending 2 hours on a vmware linux to amazon port.

EC2 AMI snapshot

Is there a way to play an EC2 AMI snapshot locally on a laptop? For example, export the AMI snapshot to VMWare? We have a sales team that need this ability when on the road with no internet connectivity (we currently use VMWare player for this). Thanks.
I believe it is still not possible for an AMI to be exported direct to VMware:
VMWare - Import Amazon EC2 AMI?
However, it is possible to mount the EBS that contains the AMI of interest to a fresh, running instance and then use VMware tools to image it and distribute that to your mobile people: http://communities.vmware.com/thread/188775

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