The Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) provides a library of VM images (“machine images” and “machine instances” in Amazon terminology) that you can use to execute work. The PlateSpin Orchestrate ec2 provisioning adapter lets you provision and terminate an Amazon template, also called an Amazon Machine Image or “AMI.” The ec2 provisioning adapter also lets you start, stop, restart, and terminate clones (“instances” in Amazon terminology) of these templates in the EC2 cloud. The provisioning adapter can also manage VMs from multiple EC2 accounts simultaneously.
The following table lists the PlateSpin Orchestrate VM actions and whether or not PlateSpin Orchestrate can perform that action on the guest operating system.
Table A-5 PlateSpin Orchestrate VM Actions Supported on Guest Operating Systems Managed by Amazon EC2
PlateSpin Orchestrate Managed VM Action |
Linux Server AMIs |
Windows Server 2003/2008 AMIs |
---|---|---|
Provision (AMI instances) |
X |
X |
Pause |
||
Resume |
||
Suspend (Stop) |
X |
X |
Shutdown (Terminate)1 |
X |
X |
Shutdown Agent |
||
Restart |
X |
X |
Hot Migrate2 |
||
Warm Migrate3 |
|
|
Move Disk Images4 |
||
Resync State |
||
Save Config |
||
Apply Config |
|
|
Create Template |
|
|
Delete / Destroy Existing Template |
X |
X |
Checkpoint |
||
Restore |
||
Remove Template Dependency |
|
|
Install Agent |
|
|
Personalize |
|
|
Cancel Action |
||
Check Host Assignment |
||
Launch Remote Desktop |
|
|
Create Virtual Disk |
||
Create Virtual NIC |
||
Delete Virtual Disk |
||
Delete Virtual NIC |
1 If you try to stop an instance that is backed by an instance store, the instance is stopped with a terminate, rather than a suspend.
2 A “hot migrate” (also called a “live migrate”) is the migration of a running VM to another host and starting it there with minimal resulting downtime (measured in milliseconds). This action requires shared storage.
3 A “warm migrate” is the migration of a suspended VM to another host and starting it there with brief resulting downtime (measured in seconds). This action requires shared storage.
4 A “move” is the relocation of VM disk images between two storage devices when the VM is in a not running state (including VMs that are suspended with a checkpoint file). This action does not require shared storage; the move is between separate repositories.
Some actions available in Amazon EC2 but not in the PlateSpin Orchestrate ec2 provisioning adapter include:
Template creation
Reserved and spot instances
Key pair and security group management
EBS storage management
VPN management
Cost calculation
For information about configuring the Amazon EC2 provisioning adapter, see Section 4.3, Configuring the Amazon EC2 Provisioning Adapter.