HVM AMI

[Jay Greguske]

On 08/29/2013 05:19 AM, Vitaly Kuznetsov wrote:
> "Olivier Delrieu" <olivier.delrieu at pgxis.com> writes:
> 
>> Dear All,
>>
>> We have been using clusters of home-made, paravirtual, S3 based, F11
>> instances for quite some time now.
>>
>> We now need to use cluster compute instances. If I am not mistaken,
>> these have to be HVM & EBS based.
>>
>> So I am looking for a Fedora AMI that would be HVM & EBS based. I’ve
>> found the latest F19 EBS based AMI, but these are paravirtual.
>>
>> If there is no such instance, is there a way:
>>
>> - to convert a paravirtual instance into a HVM instance (that would be
>> ideal as we still need paravirtual instances)
>>
> 
> I can suggest sophisticated way I've used to create F18 HVM AMI for my
> own (ami-eeac3187, us-east-1, feel free to use it):
> 
> 1) Start any existent HVM AMI (I used RHEL)
> 2) Upload RAW image with fedora
> 3) Overwrite hard drive with Fedora's data (I don't exactly remember
> but I think I was using dd)
> 4) Sync & reboot -f
> 5) Create AMI of your instance
> 
> Warning: I'm not sure AMI won't have 'RHEL' billing product attached
> after all.
> 

The createAMI API call *does* maintain the billing product, so you'll
eat the RHEL cost with this method. You could try stopping the instance,
taking an EBS snapshot, and calling ec2-register (or whatever boto's
equivalent is) on that snapshot ID instead of step 4 and 5.

- Jay