AWS VM Import/Export
Amazon Web Services
Free
Cold - full outage for the whole copy
Agentless
Smb estates
Workload V2C C2V
What it is good at
Also works in reverse - export an EC2 instance back to OVA/VHD/VMDK, which is one of the few supported C2V routes out of AWS.
Where it falls down
Cold, image-based, with significant export restrictions (instances originally imported, no marketplace AMIs). Slow for big disks.
Capabilities
- API / CLI automation
Cost and licensing
- Cost category
- Free — No licence cost from the vendor.
- Indicative price
- No service charge; you pay S3 storage and EBS
- Licence model
- No service fee. You pay for the S3 bucket holding the image and the resulting EBS snapshots.
- How to license it
- Nothing to buy. Use the AWS CLI import-image / export-image commands with an IAM role named vmimport.
- Lifecycle
- Current
- Vendor page
- https://docs.aws.amazon.com/vm-import/
Pricing and licensing last reviewed 2026-09-18. Indicative only - confirm with the vendor.
Supported sources
- VMware vSphere / ESXi (vCenter)
- Microsoft Hyper-V (Windows Server)
- Oracle VirtualBox
- Plain KVM / libvirt (RHEL, Ubuntu, SUSE)
- Amazon Web Services (EC2)
Supported targets
- Amazon Web Services (EC2)
- VMware vSphere / ESXi (vCenter)
- Microsoft Hyper-V (Windows Server)