Running Iguana on an Amazon EC2 cloud

This article was originally written for Iguana 5 so it contains version 5 screenshots, and may contain out of date references.

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is Amazon’s cloud computing virtualization platform, with somewhat more user-level abstractions of resources, compared to regular virtualization by VMware, Parallels etc., some cool tricks like Elastic IPs, Storage that can be easily attached to one machine or another, and without having to own any of the hardware.

Iguana runs in Amazon EC2 – just like in any regular machine, physical or virtual.

Furthermore you can use any tricks offered by Amazon EC2 – Elastic IPs, Storage, etc. – to implement desired configurations for flexibility, failover etc. The built support for VPN connections as part of the platform are huge.

The costs (at the time this article was written) start from about $85/month to pay for hosting Iguana in the cloud in this manner.

VPN connections with Amazon EC2 image

VPN connections are supported by Windows, just like Dial-Up connections.

VPN Client Connection setup in Windows Server 2008 R2
VPN Server setup – somewhat more complicated, as Amazon EC2 doesn’t support the more straightforward PPTP flavor of VPN (because it requires unusual IP protocol GRE (47) to be passed through the firewall, which is not supported by Amazon). You may need to set up a L2TP/IPsec configuration, use a third-party VPN server or connect to your VPN server set up outside of Amazon to get around this.
Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) may be another option to create a network inside Amazon and connect your images to it.