Ubuntu – Easy way to convert custom 32-bit AMI into 64-bit one

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I have customised (EBS-backed) AMI for running a demo version of an application of ours. (The AMI contains Ubuntu 11.04 with a Tomcat & MySQL setup for the app itself, and Jenkins for easy one-click update of the demo).

This is a 32-bit AMI, which means I have the following instance type options:

Micro (t1.micro)
Small (m1.small)
High-CPU medium (c1.medium)

We've noticed that we'd like some more performance for the demo server than what c1.medium can offer. (Specifically, I suspect "I/O Performance: Moderate" might be a bottleneck, although I'm not sure if improving that would help given that we use EBS for everything.)

Anyway, in order to use the more powerful instance types (e.g. "m1.large" or "c1.xlarge"), I would need a 64-bit AMI.

One way to do this is to create a new instance from clean 64-bit Ubuntu AMI, then re-setup my system there, and finally save that as a new AMI. I could mount a volume with the current setup, and then cp -a some stuff over to the new instance's root disk, which would help somewhat. But even so, this approach can be somewhat tedious and time-consuming.

So, my question is, is there any easier, automated way of converting a 32-bit AMI to a 64-bit one?

Best Answer

No, there is no automated way. You will have to create a new AMI starting with the Ubuntu-plain one.

It's possible to convert an Unbuntu installation but it's really messy. It's best you make a fresh AMI.

Related Solutions

Why does the custom Amazon EC2 AMI have limited instance type options

When you register the image, make sure to include an explicit

-a x86_64

Without this, you let the Black Box of Amazon's back end decide which architecture to use. Apparently it defaults to 32bit, or guessed wrong in your case.

How to clone a running EBS Backed AMI

You haven't provided a lot of detail about exactly how you "create an image out of the snapshot" but based on what I see, I'm going to guess that you may not have specified the correct AKI or ARI.

If you create an image out of a snapshot of an EBS root volume, you need to specify the AKI (kernel) to use with the new AMI. Just use the same one that was used by the original AMI. If the original AMI used an ARI (ramdisk) specify that, too.

Or...

Instead of doing the snapshot and AMI registration in separate steps, you can do it all at once with the ec2-create-image command/API. This functionality is also available in the EC2 console as the menu item "Create Image (EBS AMI)" when you right click on the instance listing. Note that this will stop the instance temporarily to make sure the snapshot is consistent.

Here's a log of a session where I ran the Ubuntu AMI you describe above, performed an ec2-create-snapshot on the instance to create a new AMI, and ran an instance of the new AMI. I was able to ssh in just fine to the new instance of the new AMI.

$ ec2-run-instances --key $USER --instance-type t1.micro ami-fd589594
RESERVATION r-12ea647c  XXX default
INSTANCE    i-50b5a230  ami-fd589594            pending XXX 0   t1.micro    2011-10-19T07:26:37+0000    us-east-1d  aki-427d952b    monitoring-disabled                 ebs         paravirtual xen     sg-XXX  default

$ ec2-create-image -n "test AMI $(date +%Y%m%d-%H%M)" i-50b5a230
IMAGE   ami-4bbc7322

$ ec2-run-instances --key $USER --instance-type t1.micro  ami-4bbc7322
RESERVATION r-66e66808  XXX default
INSTANCE    i-f2b1a692  ami-4bbc7322            pending XXX 0   t1.micro    2011-10-19T07:32:37+0000    us-east-1a  aki-427d952b    monitoring-disabled                 ebs         paravirtual xen     sg-XXX  default

$ ssh ubuntu@107.20.99.70
[...]
ubuntu@domU-12-31-39-0C-08-75:~$

Note: In order to avoid having to specify -i KEYPAIR.pem in the ssh command I uploaded my personal ssh key to EC2 following the instructions I've written about here:

Uploading Personal ssh Keys to Amazon EC2
http://alestic.com/2010/10/ec2-ssh-keys

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