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Comment by ethank | Hacker News Reader

I like that it is distributed as an OVF, but is there any thought to doing an AMI as well? I know it isn't meant for public use, but in my case I don't want it in the internal datacenter, nor is it easy to bridge subnets in remote offices. An AMI for EC2 deployment behind a VPN would be really nice.

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If you're OK with an externally hosted Github, why can't you use Github itself?

Exactly. And it is WAY cheaper. $100/month gets you more users and one less thing you have to worry about backing up and keeping up and running.

I never said I was. You can run a private EC2 infrastructure and it is sometimes more handy than having your own hypervisor server.

Every "private EC2 infrastructure" I've seen is a bunch of hypervisor servers.

Yes, but I'm trying to avoid corporate IT :)

Amazon has tools for importing other virtual machine formats into EC2 -- http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/vmimport/

... none of which are the format in question.

> The VM Import process currently supports VMware ESX VMDK images, Citrix Xen VHD images and Microsoft Hyper-V VHD images for Microsoft Windows Server 2003 (R2) and 2008 (R1 & R2).

You are correct.

Fortunately, the format if question is an open specification[1], so you can use a[2] number[3] of[4] tools[5] to convert the OVF to an interim format.

That is, obviously, a pretty ugly workaround.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Virtualization_Format

[2] http://www.vmware.com/support/developer/ovf/

[3] http://www.citrix.com/english/ss/downloads/details.asp?downl...

[4] http://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch01.html#ovf

[5] http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/system-center/vi...

I guess you can use the VMWare one to get it to an AMI importable format.

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