Windows servers are supported on AWS, but recently I had students ask a bevy of questions about them. Here are some answers. As a reminder, I speak solely for myself with these blog posts, not for AWS or any employer.
- What versions of Windows are supported?
- Here’s a list of currently supported windows AMIs.
- Can I create an AMI from an EBS snapshot of a Windows root volume?
- Unlike with a linux EBS snapshot, you cannot create an AMI from a root volume. You can create an AMI from a running instance, however. The reason for the limitation is that sysprep must be run on the Windows server, and you can’t run sysprep on a EBS volume that is not running.
- In order to take an accurate snapshot, I need to quiesce the disk. How can I do so?
- This is a thorny problem and I don’t think there’s a great answer. You want to shut down as many apps as you can. You also may find the Volume Shadow Copy Service useful. You may want to review the answers here on this reddit thread.
- I have a Windows bastion host, and I want to allow more than two users to access this host at one time. How can I do this?
- You need to purchase additional Remote Desktop Services licenses. From the FAQ: “Amazon EC2 instances come with two Remote Desktop Services (aka Terminal Services) licenses for administration purposes. If additional Remote Desktop Services licenses are needed, they should be purchased from Microsoft or a Microsoft license reseller. Remote Desktop Services licenses purchased with Software Assurance have license mobility benefits and can be brought to AWS multi-tenant environments.”
- Is powershell a first class citizen with the same functionality as the CLI or the supported SDKs?
- Nope. From the Powershell page: “The AWS Tools for Windows PowerShell lets you perform many of the same actions available in the AWS SDK for .NET. You can use it from the command line for quick tasks, like controlling your Amazon EC2 instances.” (Emphasis added.)
- Do you have any example userdata scripts for Windows AMIs?
- There are some examples here.
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