This blog focuses on Win7 on AWS but note that you can also run WinXP, Windows 8, Windows 10 etc by following similar steps.
If you have Active Directory in your environment and you’re looking for cloud options, or as you’re thinking about how you want to structure your client testing lab, you will most likely need Windows machines for your labs. Here’s a simple how-to guide to run Windows 7 on AWS EC2 very quickly, for any Windows use case. Follow this guide to install Windows 7 from ISO, install VMware tools, and you’re good to go.
As you probably know it’s not possible to install and run Windows 7 natively on AWS. Ravello makes it possible using nested virtualization. First, we’re going to log into Ravello, create a new application and find the provided empty VM in our Ravello library and drag and drop it onto the canvas.
Next we need to find our ISO. An initial step would be to upload your Win 7 ISO to Ravello. I’m not going to cover it here, but here’s a very quick guide to upload your ISO. Assuming we have the ISO - we can go ahead and configure the disk to first boot from CD-ROM. We’ll browse through the library and choose the relevant Windows 7 ISO.
Now let’s publish the application. By the way, I found that you should use at least 2 vCPU on the VM (preferably 4).
Once the VM is published we can open up the console and go through the Win 7 installation.
Basically, that’s it. You have a Windows VM running in the cloud (in our case I chose to publish on AWS Virginia region, but you can publish on any of the AWS and Google cloud regions). You can use the console now, and if the mouse behavior feels not quite right, you should install VMware tools.
So first - we’ll go back to the application canvas in Ravello and now add a disk to our VM, this time - browse in the library to your VMware Tools ISO (again after uploading the VMware tools ISO to our library). Once we update the VM in the canvas, the VM will restart. Now if we look at the device manager in the VM, we’ll see that we have the VMware Pointing Device.
Now to finalize and optimize the VM’s performance, it is recommended to use para-virtualized devices for network and as a disk controller - so in the network configuration, we’ll use VMXNet3. For the disk - we’ll add a disk using PVSCSI controller.
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The VM will restart again, and we will have a Windows 7 machine running on AWS. I hope this guide will be helpful to you when you set up your Windows machine. You can start a free trial and walk through these steps.
This is a technology blog. If you want to use Ravello to run Windows, you must comply with Microsoft's licensing policies and requirements. Please consult with your Microsoft representative.
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