Setting Up A Windows Virtual Machine On Amazon AWS

In this article, I’ll show you how to get started with Amazon AWS (Amazon Web Services) Cloud Computing platform and specifically with Amazon EC2 Compute.

AWS officially launched in 2006 with a few web services for developers and software engineers, today Amazon AWS Is ranked as the No #1 Public Cloud Computing Provider In the world and is also the market leader In this Industry.

As of writing these line, AWS offers more than 70 Cloud Services backed by 16 Data Centres World Wide with 3 new regions to come online later this year.

AWS makes 56% of Amazon profit which Increases by 40% year over year.

The most used AWS Services are:

  • EC2 – Elastic Compute Cloud – This Is the IaaS Virtual Machine Service that offer pay as you go VMs, AWS calls Virtual Machines Instances.
  • S3 – Simple Storage Service – Web Storage Service on the Internet
  • EBS -Elastic Block Storage – provides persistent block-level storage volumes for EC2 Virtual Machine
  • Route 53 – Managed DNS Service

Below, I’ll show you how I create a Virtual Machine running Windows Server on the EC2 Cloud.

To get started, go to https://aws.amazon.com

Sign-up or log In

The first step of creating a VM Is to first set up a Resource Group which Is a logical Container that holds all your VM, Network and Storage In the same logical container.

You will have to specify the Data Centre location, Name, and type of resources

Once done, You will see the newly created group under the Resource Groups Menu

To create a VM, I can either start the Wizard from the solution page or the Services menu

If I click on Services -> EC2 Dashboard I’ll see the all the options. From there I click on Launch Instance

From the Instance menu, I Select the VM OS type

As you can see below, There are many options to select from.

Next, Select the Instance Size

I’ll Continue with the wizard until I get to the security section

In the security section, I will need to create a new key pair (certificate) or use an existing one.

Note: This part Is very important, Without a key pair you will not be able to get the default admin password of the VM

Below, I’ll create a new key and download it to my machine, Later I’ll open it with a notepad and copy \ paste it Into the Admin password menu.

At this stage, The Instance will start and will take around 4 minutes to be up and running and ready to log in

To get the administrator password, select the VM and from the action, menu click on Get Windows Password

Open the Key Pair and paste the content the Retrieve Password screen

Click decrypt password

Below, you will see the IP, Username, and password to login to the VM

Next, I’ll RDP to the VM

Done


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