I've been running Linux servers on Amazon EC2 for a while now; the experience has been great. I've recently needed to bring up a Windows server to run some Windows-only software that our product needs to use, and am running into a problem figuring out how to install the software, which is only available on DVD.
With Linux I can just install packages from a Web-based repository and take advantage of EC2's fast network throughput, but so far on the Windows instance I've had to upload my ISO images to EC2 and mount them from the Windows EC2 instance. For some reason I'm getting really slow upload speeds to EC2, even though the regular upload speed from our office is pretty good (around 7Mbps).
I've also tried mounting the DVD drive on my machine as a local drive on the EC2 instance via Remote Desktop, and then running the software install from the local drive, but I run into the same slow upload speed issue.
Does anyone have a better way to install software from physical media onto an EC2 instance ?
Best Answer
If your upload speed is generally pretty good, then it looks to be a slow upload to amazon, so using any sort of third party in the middle my help your speed, say uploading to and FTP site, then downloading from Amazon, which should be quicker than upload. Yes it involves an extra step, but it may make it quicker in the long run.
If your trying to upload Microsoft media, if you have an MSDN or Technet subscription maybe you could download it from there?