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Yes, I know, I would never do this for a production environment, but I'm just wondering if anybody has pulled this off.

Google comes up pretty empty.

gravyface
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6 Answers6

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Since EC2 instances are already virtualized, I'd be surprised if any of those packages would run under a second layer of VZ. Let us know what you find out.

Update: please see the comments below. Things have changed in the past 6 years!

uSlackr
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  • tried virtualbox first but got a "suitable module not found" error that I haven't spent any time on. Next up is KVM. – gravyface Feb 02 '11 at 14:49
  • We're curious as to whether you've had any luck... – uSlackr Feb 11 '11 at 21:58
  • No dice. Gave up. I suspect they spent more time foolproofing this than I care to spend getting this to work. – gravyface Mar 18 '11 at 00:15
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    This answer is not authoritative or current: Running Virtualbox works on both GCE and EC2. See http://stackoverflow.com/a/30671344/1264797 and http://stackoverflow.com/a/36023101/1264797 for examples. – stevegt Feb 10 '17 at 18:20
  • Of course it isn't current - it is 6 years old. – uSlackr Feb 10 '17 at 21:43
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I know I am resurrecting an old question with this response, but this page comes up when you Google for answers on the subject and I'd like it to be helpful to other Google users.

Xen-Blanket (see http://code.google.com/p/xen-blanket/) allows you to run Xen on an EC2 instance. The authors have tested it and report reasonable performance. I have done this successfully myself and achieved similar results.

The main limitations are two-fold: first, you can only use hvm Amazon instances, not paravirtual. That means you need the cluster compute instance (starting at $1.50 on demand, ~$.50 spot). Second, it uses a fairly old version of Xen (3.1.2 I believe), so your knowledge of how to create and run an image may need to be downgraded to 2007 levels.

I should note that re-selling Amazon is prohibited by the user agreement, so this is useful as a thought experiment / fun evening, unless you have a real nested virtualization use-case (they exist; see the IBM Turtles pro

Mike
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  • One use case is to host operating systems (old or odd) that aren't supported by the bare hardware at EC2 or GCE. A valid reason to do this is to port code from those operating systems into something more current or standard. – stevegt Feb 10 '17 at 18:25
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KVM supports running a KVM hypervisor inside a KVM guest; The Xenner folks are working to allow you to run a Xen VM inside a KVM guest; Recent patches on the KVM mailing list are working towards allowing it to run HyperV on a KVM guest. I don't think Amazon is using KVM as its hypervisor, but if it moved in that direction this could be possible at some point.

n8whnp
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  • GCE uses KVM, so it might work there. Virtualbox does work: http://stackoverflow.com/a/30671344/1264797 – stevegt Feb 10 '17 at 18:21
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Thanks to the recently GA'd i3.metal EC2 instances, you can now run Hyper-V on AWS. Here's the official AWS announcement from May 17th, 2018.

There's also a VMware Cloud on AWS offering that is sold and supported by VMware.

Trevor Sullivan
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The examples given in the question Xen/KVM/Virtualbox/VMWare/Hyper-V are hardware virtualization dependent. A more interesting option is OpenVZ which is not hardware virtualization dependent.

Here is a recent post: http://webapp.org.ua/sysadmin/installing-openvz-on-amazon-ec2/

Amala
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Ravello Systems have a solution to run virtual environment on the public cloud.

(Proper disclosure, I'm Ravello employee)

anon
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