double POSITIVE Marketing Group, Inc.

Working in IT I am constantly looking to spend less money and get the same or better results. DoublePositive has been using Amazon’s web services since they released the products several years ago. We started using S3 as soon as it was available. When Windows was released we started using EC2 as well. One of our servers is a small light duty one which uses a lot of CPU but not much RAM. I decided to start out with a small instance, since the use of this server was not real-time. Letting this small instance peg the CPU at 100% for 2-5 minutes at a time was no big deal. We have used it for several years now. A couple of months ago Amazon released an even smaller instance called micro. The hourly cost of the micro instance is a quarter of the small instance cost (3 cents versus 12 cents). It has a burstable CPU to twice what the small has but about half of the RAM. Seeing the price difference and know our server requirements makes the move to the micro instance a no-brainer. The only problem is that my small instance server uses S3 backed storage and the micro instance has to use EBS backed storage. Since there is no migration documentation provided by Amazon this is what I did. In the below steps I use 3 instances to migrate; the live server, temp server and destination server.

1. 1.Bundle existing S3 backed instance, this will give you the latest image so when you start it again the image will have the latest data.

a. Running requisite tools for C drive are a given; defrag, cleaning up and running sdelete

2. 2. Startup additional instance of live server. This is the temp server – I started it up in another security group so I didn’t have any conflicts with the live one

3. Backup server temp server
4. Startup new AMI from Amazon’s EBS images as the destination server in same security group and availability zone as temp server
5. Create image of destination server (this may be an extra step, but each time you create an image it gives a new starting point, so I do this frequently.
6. Connect to temp server and copy over the backup files then restore to destination server
7. Reboot destination
8. Attach any volumes needed and make any other customization to destination server
9. Create image
10. Terminate server and run instance with correct security group
11. Disassociate the Elastic IP address from live server and associate to destination server
12. Test
13. Once working terminate live and temp servers

That should complete the migration and your server will be up and running in a micro instance.