Amazon EC2 and Windows fun

I've been fuddling around EC2 and Windows for about 6 months now and have been trying to transfer this big VMWare Windows Server 3 image to run in the cloud. I have found numerous post to transfer Linux VMWare to EC2 which I don't think from my research I could replicate for Windows.

The following post was probably the most informative (Webfellas reference) although some of the bundling command involved are not available in the Windows EC2 command API. I thought that I could eventually transfer the Windows image anyhow using a Linux instance but my Unix skills being somewhat limited, and after reviewing AWS forums stating that uploading a Windows image from scratch would not work because of the low level hardware and virtual CPU requirements, I revert to another alternative.

So last weekend I did a full Windows backup into a .bkf file that I uploaded to a specific EBS volume that I had mounted on my Windows instance. Since this file being about 30 GB in size, ti took a while (actually close to 48 hours in total - not surprising since at even an upload bandwith of 1 MBPS it would take about 300 000 seconds = 83 hours).

So finally, this morning I was able to restore all the C drive containing the OS and I also elected to restore the system state. When restarting the instance though, I got the following system log in the EC2 console:

3/23/2010 12:17:59 PM: Waiting for meta-data accessibility... 3/23/2010 12:22:35 PM: Still waiting for meta-data accessibility... 3/23/2010 12:24:26 PM: Still waiting for meta-data accessibility... 3/23/2010 12:26:16 PM: Still waiting for meta-data accessibility... 3/23/2010 12:28:07 PM: Still waiting for meta-data accessibility... 3/23/2010 12:29:58 PM: Still waiting for meta-data accessibility... 3/23/2010 12:31:48 PM: Still waiting for meta-data accessibility... 3/23/2010 12:33:38 PM: Still waiting for meta-data accessibility... 3/23/2010 12:35:28 PM: Still waiting for meta-data accessibility... 3/23/2010 12:37:18 PM: Still waiting for meta-data accessibility... 3/23/2010 12:39:08 PM: Still waiting for meta-data accessibility... 3/23/2010 12:40:58 PM: Still waiting for meta-data accessibility... 3/23/2010 12:42:49 PM: Still waiting for meta-data accessibility... 3/23/2010 12:44:39 PM: Still waiting for meta-data accessibility... 3/23/2010 12:48:08 PM: Waiting for meta-data accessibility...

I think I might have pushed my luck to hard and ended up messing the low level code of Windows that interact with the virtual hardware.

My plan is now to recreated a new W2k3 instance and selectively restore some of the backup... I'll keep you posted!