Context Cloud Computing is the new trend in the IT industry. Traditionally obtaining servers was quiet time consuming for companies. The whole process of research on what kind of hardware to buy, get budget approval, purchase the hardware and get access to the servers could take weeks or months. In order to save time and reduce expenses, most companies are moving towards the cloud. One of the known cloud providers is Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Amazon EC2 makes it easy for companies to obtain virtual servers (known as computer instances) in a cloud quickly and inexpensively. Another advantage of using Amazon EC2 is the flexibility that they offer, so the companies can even import/export the Virtual Machines (VM) that they have built which meets the companies IT security, configuration, management and compliance requirements into Amazon EC2.

Objectives In this thesis, we investigate importing a VM running on VMware into Amazon EC2. In addition, we make a performance comparison between a VM running on VMware and the VM with same image running on Amazon EC2.

Methods A Case study research has been done to select a persistent method to migrate VMware VMs to Amazon EC2. In addition an experimental research is conducted to measure the performance of Virtual Machine running on VMware and compare it with same Virtual Machine running on EC2. We measure the performance in terms of CPU, memory utilization as well as disk read/write speed using well-known open-source benchmarks from Phoronix Test Suite (PTS).

Results Investigation on importing VM snapshots (VMDK, VHD and RAW format) to EC2 was done using three methods provided by AWS. Comparison of performance was done by running each benchmark for 25 times on each Virtual Machine.

Conclusions Importing VM to EC2 was successful only with RAW format and replication was not successful as AWS installs some software and drivers while importing the VM to EC2. Migrated EC2 VM performs better than on premise VMware VM in terms of CPU, memory utilization and disk read/write speed.