Anti-random

Many of you might know of Amazon’s Elastic Cloud Computing platform. If not, check this article I wrote about it recently.

Anyway, I had to migrate an Amazon computer from their Virginia Data center to their new Oregon Data center. The rental costs are the same but Oregon is closer to California, so it makes for more responsive computing. Unfortunately the Amazon Web Services webpage from where you control everything doesn’t offer a simple point and click option to achieve this. So unfortunately, I had to do it by hand. Rather unproductive :(

Newbie checkpoint

Before we move on, I must say, this one is a fairly technical article. I’ve written this more as a note to myself for future references than an article for widespread consumption. If you’re new to EC2, you probably don’t care about the details. This article I wrote on EC2 recently may be more appropriate.

However, if a Google search brought you here, then you know what you’re looking for.

I) Setting it up

We’re going to use Linux to copy the Windows volume, byte-for-byte across the network. It’s actually very simple, I’ve just given detailed instructions to assist newbies.

1. Backup your Windows EBS volume at the source region

1. Shutdown your Windows EC2 instance.
2. Detach Volume. volumes section -> the Windows volume(Right click) -> Detach Volume.
3. Create snapshot. Right click it again -> create snapshot.
4. Note the ‘zone’ of the volume (eg. ‘us-east-1b’) somewhere. You need it shortly

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I’ve been wanting to have my own blog for quite some time now, so I’m glad to finally have put one up here. I intend to accumulate my thoughts and questions over here, accumulating then over the years as a digital diary.