Considerations for image export - VM Import/Export

Considerations for image export

Exporting images and volumes is subject to the following limitations:

  • You must export to one of the following image formats that your virtualization environment supports:

    • Virtual Hard Disk (VHD), which is compatible with Citrix Xen and Microsoft Hyper-V virtualization products.

    • Stream-optimized ESX Virtual Machine Disk (VMDK), which is compatible with VMware ESX and VMware vSphere versions 4, 5, and 6.

    • Raw format.

  • The base AMI used to launch an instance must exist when you attempt to export the instance. If you have deleted the AMI, the export fails.

  • VM Import/Export only supports exporting VMs to an S3 bucket in the same AWS account that you export them from.

  • Export operations do not support hybrid configurations. GRUB2 must be enabled for either BIOS or UEFI, but it can't be enabled for both.

  • You can't export an image if it contains third-party software provided by AWS. For example, VM Export cannot export Windows or SQL Server images, or any image created from an image in the AWS Marketplace.

  • You can't export an image with encrypted EBS snapshots in the block device mapping.

  • You can only export EBS data volumes that are specified in the block device mapping, not EBS volumes attached after instance launch.

  • You can't export an image from Amazon EC2 if you've shared it from another AWS account.

  • You can't have multiple export image tasks in progress for the same AMI at the same time.

  • By default, you can't have more than 5 conversion tasks per Region in progress at the same time. This limit is adjustable up to 20.

  • VMs with volumes larger than 1 TiB are not supported.

  • You can export a volume to either an unencrypted S3 bucket or to a bucket encrypted using SSE-S3 encryption. You cannot export to an S3 bucket encrypted using SSE-KMS encryption.