Considerations for image export - VM Import/Export
Services or capabilities described in Amazon Web Services documentation might vary by Region. To see the differences applicable to the China Regions, see Getting Started with Amazon Web Services in China (PDF).

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 Amazon Web Services 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 Amazon. For example, VM Export cannot export Windows or SQL Server images, or any image created from an image in the Amazon Web Services 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 Amazon 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.