Creating a new EC2 AMI from within VMware or from VMDK files
I've used VMware for many years to allow me to test and develop various server configurations and distributions. It's where I played with Linux-VServer, User Mode Linux (UML), Kernel Based Virtual Machine (KVM) and Xen. The relevent part to EC2 here is obviously that EC2 is also Xen based.
So far when using EC2 I've stood on the shoulders of giants and taken existing AMIs and used them as they are or with modification. Always the control freak, I wanted to create my own AMI from scratch. Having slimmed down my hardware inventory (I got complaints about the various half built towers lying around!) then my only option was to either create an image in a loopback device on EC2 or return to my trusty steed of VMware.
Creating the AMI from VMware was easier than I thought - but just in case anyone else is looking to do it then I thought it worthy of a blog post.
