Following on from my previous posts which assumed you already had an instance up and running, I’ve decided to do a quick run through on creating a Windows instance on Amazon EC2 using their new AWS console… Hope it helps!

1) Key Pairs
So, log on to the console and head on down to “Key Pairs” section. This will setup a secure way for you to contact your EC2 instance, via SSH if you wanted, in our case – to decrypt the Administrator password.

Click the “Create Key Pair” button:

Give your key a name and press “Create”:

Once created, the console will also enable you to download your key. Save it to your computer somewhere, you’ll need it later.

2) Security Groups
Next up is the security group. This is basically a firewall controller, we need to tell Amazon which ports to open so you can use your server, like 80 for http, 3389 for RDP (Remote Desktop), 110 for POP3.

So, goto Security Groups in the left hand menu, and click the button “Create Security Group”.  In the pop up, give the group a name and a description:

Click “Create”. Once done, you should see your new group in the list. There is also a “default” group there which you should keep.

If you highlight your new security group, a split pane will show the details of which ports you have opened for that group. Obviously we have none, so lets open the critical ones: 80, 3389 and 20 for SSH:

Literally select the method from the dropdown in the list, and Amazon fills in the rest. Hit save for that row, and you’re done. You can then add multiple connection methods for HTTP, RDP etc etc… You also have the opportunity to enter a custom method, but use it wisely!

3) Instance
So, let’s create our instance. Goto the “Instances” menu option on the left of the console and hit “Launch Instances”. As before, a nice popup appears, this time you get to select which type of instance you want to create. We’ll choose the Windows 2003 Basic server to get us started:

Press the “Select” button for the Windows server, on the next screen we get our options:

At this point we can choose the number of instance (Let’s say 1 to start), Type of instance (ie a small or medium CPU instance) – let’s go small. Key pair name which you select the relevant name we just created above, and also security groups. Make sure the “default” group as well as your new security group. There are some advanced options, but let’s skip those for today’s tutorial. Click “Launch”.

You should now see your instance in your instance list with the status of “starting”. It can take upto 10 minutes to become “running”.

4) Connecting
Once we’re green that means we can go! First thing we need to do is get the Administrator password. This can take a few more minutes. Click the “Password” button whilst your instance is highlighted. You will get this message if it’s not ready yet:

Wait a few minutes, try again. You will be asked to paste the contents of the key pair file you downloaded to your computer earlier in section (1). Just open the file in a text editor and copy paste the entire text into the form:

Click “Decrypt Password” and wait a bit. Hopefully you will then be presented with the following information:

Phew! Nearly there…. All we need to do now is Remote Desktop into your instance. So, open up RDC on your machine (Mac or PC). Use the full computer name and hit connect:

When asked for the username and password, use “Administrator” as the username, and the password you were given… We’re done!!!

This entry was posted on Monday, January 12th, 2009 and is filed under AWS, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.