Amazon Web Services will now allow customers to run Windows 11 on Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances, the company announced.
As explained in a blog post by (*11*) (opens in a new tab), the import/export feature now supports migration of Windows 111 VMs, allowing customers to "launch instances using images uploaded to EC2 Dedicated Hosts and EC2 Dedicated Instances".
As reported by The Register (opens in a new tab), Andrew Riley, Senior Technical Account Manager at (*11*), outlined some criteria that must be met to import Windows 11 virtual machines to EC2:
- An OVA, VHD/X, VMDK or XVA file is required
- Users must have a valid Microsoft E3 or E5 license for Windows 11
- S3 storage is required for the AMI
(*11*) on Windows 11
The (*11*) blog post (opens in a new tab) clarifies that to run a Windows 11 virtual machine on EC2, the default boot mode must be set to Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI). This is a must as Windows 11 required UEFI-enabled machines.
It's a move that should make it easier to run the latest Windows operating system on (*11*), but The Register suspects that running DaaS-ware may also make it possible.
On a virtual machine import/export page from (*11*), the company states that "you can import Windows and Linux virtual machines that use VMware ESX or Workstation, Microsoft Hyper-V, and Citrix Xen virtualization formats."
Availability is defined as "(*11*) GovCloud (US) and all public regions of (*11*)" with the sole exception of Amazon Web Services Asia Pacific (Jakarta).
Earlier this year, we found that (*11*)'s share of the IaaS market had plummeted, giving way to the rise of Azure as the two tech giants continue to battle for global dominance.