One problem I've had at every place employment I've worked at in the last few years is getting a VM which matches production to use as a sandbox. With this kind of thing it would make that a snap. "What's the difference between this and production?" "Nothing. It's the same image."

Yep

Not only that, but many enterprise systems are not just a server, or even a couple of servers, but a cluster of servers of various configurations.

With good bandwidth, you could pull the entire bunch down locally to use in dev and testing. That's unheard of as far as I know (although it has been the holy grail for some time) Businesses that start and grow in an environment like this are going to have significant advantages over older businesses.

VMWare offers a tool that solves this problem -- Lab Manager (http://www.vmware.com/products/labmanager/).

It even supports setting up environments that contain isolated clones of multiple servers (see other child comment).

From what I understand it's going to be replaced with a new product fairly soon, but I've heard great things about Lab Manger.

Check out DevStructure blueprints (http://devstructure.com).

> I really like the idea of moving VMs in and out of the cloud.

Out of? That's funny, I don't see a "VM Export" feature. Surely you don't mean booting up a debian rescue image and DD'ing your disk over SSH somewhere else?

It would be great to one day be able to take a live VM, package it up and transfer it to your laptop for testing, then you can patch things up and send it back to EC2, but that day is not today.

I'm sick of having these cloud services have such blatant disregard for switching to a different provider. It gives a new, colder meaning to your statement: "They are making it really hard to pick any other alternative."

Uhh, what about ec2-download-bundle? Last I checked you could use that to download your image files.

http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AWSEC2/latest/CommandLineR...

I am not so sure the exported bundle can be run off AWS, are you sure about that?

On a side note, doesn't the download bundle task require you to stop the instance? That could be a problem since the task can take quite some time to complete during which time your server will be unavailable.

Yeah. It's just a Xen VM. I do this every month or so. You just have to make sure that you have a kernel and modules you can boot the image with on your local Xen host. This is pretty easy, you can do it with whatever package manager your distro comes with, or if you created the image on a local Xen machine, you probably already have this. (yum install kernel-xen works on rhel)

It's true that you can't really do this with a live VM, since the AMI on EC2 will be whatever you had on the image before you last booted it. But you can do a ec2-bundle-vol on your live image to create a new AMI, then do your ec2-download-bundle on your new AMI.

You're really not as "locked in" to EC2 as some people think. You can easily pull your images off there, and then install Nimbus or OpenStack or something and run a local cloud. That's what we do at my job.