Anybody get Xen/KVM/Virtualbox/VMWare/Hyper-V running on an EC2 instance?

Yes, I know, I would never do this for a production environment, but I'm just wondering if anybody has pulled this off.

Google comes up pretty empty.

Solution 1:

Since EC2 instances are already virtualized, I'd be surprised if any of those packages would run under a second layer of VZ. Let us know what you find out.

Update: please see the comments below. Things have changed in the past 6 years!

Solution 2:

I know I am resurrecting an old question with this response, but this page comes up when you Google for answers on the subject and I'd like it to be helpful to other Google users.

Xen-Blanket (see http://code.google.com/p/xen-blanket/) allows you to run Xen on an EC2 instance. The authors have tested it and report reasonable performance. I have done this successfully myself and achieved similar results.

The main limitations are two-fold: first, you can only use hvm Amazon instances, not paravirtual. That means you need the cluster compute instance (starting at $1.50 on demand, ~$.50 spot). Second, it uses a fairly old version of Xen (3.1.2 I believe), so your knowledge of how to create and run an image may need to be downgraded to 2007 levels.

I should note that re-selling Amazon is prohibited by the user agreement, so this is useful as a thought experiment / fun evening, unless you have a real nested virtualization use-case (they exist; see the IBM Turtles pro