Amazon Technologies, Inc.

Suk Won Kim

John Merrill Phillips

Ekanth Sethuramalingam

David Samuel Zipkin

Migrating servers from client networks to virtual machines (VMs) on a provider network. A migration appliance is installed or booted on the client network, and a migration initiator is instantiated on the provider network. A VM and associated volumes are instantiated on the provider network. The initiator sends a request for a boot sector to the appliance; the appliance reads the blocks from a volume on the client network, converts the blocks to a format used by the VM, and sends the blocks to the initiator. The initiator boots the VM using the boot sector and the VM begins execution. The initiator then retrieves all data blocks for the VM from volumes on the client network via the appliance, stores the data to the volumes on the provider network, and fulfills requests from the VM from either local volumes or the remote volumes via the appliance.

Virtual machine migration

Methods and apparatus for updating virtual machines (VMs) on a provider network according to modifications made to a server in a client network. A version of the server may be currently instantiated and executing as one or more VM instances on the provider network. Agent(s) installed on the server in the client network intercept write requests to volume(s) attached to the server, and send blocks that include updates to the server volume(s) to a service on the provider network. The service stores the blocks to incremental snapshots, and generates timestamped machine images (MIs) of the server from the snapshots. A VM service updates the VM instances on the provider network according to the MIs. Thus, the VM instances can be kept up to date with changes to the server without having to upload the entire volume(s) to the provider network to perform each update.

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Palo Alto, CA, United States of America

Suk Won Kim