You can convert an Amazon EC2 Windows instance to a VMware Workstation virtual machine (VM), and then manually import the VM to an ESXi host.

Prerequisites

Verify that the source Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Windows instance has a temporary volume that is large enough to accommodate the image of your Amazon EC2 Windows instance. This temporary drive must be excluded from the conversion.

Procedure

  1. Install Converter Standalone on the Amazon EC2 Windows instance that you want to convert.
  2. Create a conversion task to import the Amazon EC2 Windows instance as a Workstation destination.
    1. Start Converter Standalone on the Amazon EC2 Windows instance.
    2. Click Convert Machine in the application menu to start the Conversion wizard.
    3. On the Source System page, select Powered on from the Select source type menu and click This local machine.
    4. Click Next to proceed to the Specify Destination page.
    5. On the Destination System page, select VMware Workstation or other VMware virtual machine from the drop-down menu and select a suitable VMware Workstation version from the VMware product list.
    6. Click Next to proceed to the Options page.
    7. On the Options page, select Data to Copy in the list of options.
    8. Deselect the check box in front of the temporary volume to exclude it from the conversion task.
    9. Click Next to proceed to the Summary page.
    VMware Workstation VM files, such as vmx and vmdk files, are created during the conversion.
  3. On the temporary volume of the Amazon EC2 Windows instance, locate the VMware Workstation VM files that were created during the conversion.
  4. Transfer the VMware Workstation VM files to a location that is accessible to your virtual infrastructure and to Converter Standalone. You have several options to transfer the files:
    • Upload the files to a local FTP server using an FTP client that runs inside the Amazon EC2 Windows instance.
    • Upload the files from the Amazon EC2 Windows instance to Amazon S3 and download them to a location that is accessible to your virtual infrastructure and to Converter Standalone.
    • Upload the files from the Amazon EC2 Windows instance to Amazon S3 and use Amazon AWS Import/Export to retrieve the data on a physical storage device. For more information about this procedure, see Amazon Web Services.

What to do next

To import the VMware Workstation VM image to an ESXi host, follow the procedures described in Select a VMware Hosted Virtual Machine to Convert and in Select a Managed Destination.