Boot EC2 EBS volume locally?

I want to do some testing with an EC2 instance, but to download it to my PC and run it locally on Virtu开发者_如何学PythonalBox/KVM or the like. Is it possible?

No, it's not. EC2 instances run on a customised Red Hat Xen layer whose AMIs are tailored specifically to that platform. Those images cannot be used anywhere else.

Well, you can use VMWare to create an image, work on it and then upload it to EC2. Amazon introduced this feature in Dec 2010. However, this will only be useful to you if you work on Windows Server 2008 SP2. See the Amazon VM Import Page

As of mid 2013, VMware imports to EC2 are not restricted only to windows.

"You can import VMware ESX and VMware Workstation VMDK images, Citrix Xen VHD images and Microsoft Hyper-V VHD images for Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2003 R2, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.1-6.5 (using Cloud Access), Centos 5.1-6.5, Ubuntu 12.04, 12.10, 13.04, 13.10, and Debian 6.0.0-6.0.8, 7.0.0-7.2.0. You can export previously imported EC2 instances to VMware ESX VMDK, VMware ESX OVA, Microsoft Hyper-V VHD or Citrix Xen VHD file formats. We plan to support import for additional operating systems, versions and virtualization infrastructure products in the future."

IF you imported the image, you may simply use the EC2 CLI to export the image as an OVA or VMDK. AWS Official Blog entry & EC2 CLI command info

If not, you can follow the instructions here to convert the image to a VMDK. The instructions are for Vagrant, but only part 3 of the instructions are vagrant-specific, so you may simply skip that part to stop with a working VMDK.

See also this ServerFault question.