Amazon Web Services will now allow customers to run Windows 11 on Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances, the company announced.
As explained in an AWS blog post (opens in new tab)the Import/Export feature now supports migration of Windows 111 virtual machines, allowing customers to “launch instances using the imported images on EC2 Dedicated Host and EC2 Dedicated Instances”.
As reported by The Registry (opens in new tab)AWS Senior Technical Account Manager Andrew Riley has laid out a handful of criteria that must be met to bring Windows 11 virtual machines into 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
AWS on Windows 11
The AWS blog post (opens in new tab) details that, to run a Windows 11 virtual machine on EC2, the default boot mode should be set to Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI). This is necessary because Windows 11 required UEFI-enabled machines.
This is a move planned to make running the latest Windows operating system on AWS simpler, but The Registry he suspects that running DaaS-ware might also make this possible.
On an AWS VM Import/Export page, the company says that “you can import Windows and Linux VMs that use VMware ESX or Workstation, Microsoft Hyper-V, and Citrix Xen virtualization formats.”
Availability is set to expand to “AWS GovCloud (US) and all public AWS Regions”, with the only exception being the Amazon Web Services Asia Pacific (Jakarta) region.
Earlier this year, we discovered that AWS’s share of the IaaS market had been falling, leaving room for Azure to grow as the two tech giants continue to battle for global dominance.