Company's email and web are now on EC2

Turns out Comcast doesn’t follow through (even when you call them many times to try to get them to). Thanks #Comcast . On Thursday, I bought a Mifi (pay as you go) from Verizon. Got it into the office. Had moved the web/mail stuff to Amazon EC2 “just in case” Comcast pulled a … well … Comcast. Yeah, took me a little while to fix the email and web side. We’ve been using our router appliance as our SOA for dns, and I had to unplug it at the old site (got everything out before 5pm Friday). So we now have a pair of machines running in EC2 (not reserved instances yet, I don’t think we need them until I get a read from Comcast on exactly how long it will take to get fracking feedback from them on when they might even deign to come out to wire us up … the box is right fracking next to my rear door, just one hole … and some wiring … geez). ok, enough grousing. Got some of the net infrastructure up there. Have the Comcast cable modem tied into the appliance, and tied into our GbE switch. Also have the Wifi up. I may connect another appliance to this, configure it to use the Mifi as its gateway, and then just wire up the rest of the machines. Won’t be able to get customers into the site, and we have a few waiting. But the EC2 setup was pretty painless. I’d like more options though, in terms of number of virtual cores with a 4GB memory size. Mail doesn’t take much, but web serving with Drupal can. We have a database, a web server, and other bits. Running on a single instance. Single virtual core. Sometimes it bogs down. Might cycle it for a 4 core instance for a while. I can deal with a couple of days like that if needed. I was amused by the Amazon cost comparison. Apparently, it costs me more than $100k to run my own servers per year. Who knew? Ok, those are marketing numbers, and they are complete crap. They have little bearing on reality. We know that. Running our web/email presence on EC2 in perpetuity would be more than an order of magnitude more costly than running it ourselves. The real value in EC2 is that you can spin it up pretty quickly to handle crap like this. Even after we get our service back, I’ll probably keep these instances at least stored somewhere, so I can spin em up quickly if needed. What would be awesome, from my perspective, and I am sure someone has something like this (not the VMware product) … is to take a real machine, and convert it into an AMI, so we can upload it. That would be useful. Haven’t tried this yet, haven’t searched for the code to do this with. VMware has some product like this … we tried the 4.0x version that sorta kinda almost worked. The inverse process would be nice as well, but right now I want to take physical and make virtual out of it. Even better would be being able to run these locally. I think Eucalyptus does the “run locally” version, but last I’ve heard they aren’t doing well. Might prefer to go with OpenStack like things and kvm. Anyone know of a nice physical -> kvm VM converter? And last I saw, Amazon doesn’t (yet) run kvm machines. Hopefully this will change, or AMI < -> kvm converters will start working well.