In this post, I will be showing you how to spin-up a Windows Server machine on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). This post will get you started on how to use Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Windows instances.
Step 1: Launch Instance
- Sign into the AWS Management Console at https://console.aws.amazon.com and click on EC2
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- Click on ‘Launch Instance’
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- Select ‘Quick Launch Wizard’ → Enter Instance Name → Select your Public/Private key pairs (Checkout my post on how to create a key pair) → Scroll down and click on ‘Microsoft Windows Server 2012 Base‘ which is the base image I will be using for this post → Click Continue
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- Review your settings → then click Launch to launch the instance
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Note: The default security group created authorizes all IP addresses to access your instance over the specified ports (i.e. 3389=RDP). In a production, you need to authorize only specific IP address or range of IP addresses by clicking on the Edit details → Security Settings and create a new Security Group
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- You should get a notification page letting you know your instance is been launched
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- Close the screen and wait for the status checks to complete initialization….
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- You should see this when initialization is completed
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Step 2: Connect to Instance
- To connect to the server → Right-click on the instance and click Connect
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- In the Console Connect dialog box → click Retrieve Password
- Click Browse and navigate to the private key file → Select the file and click OK (the private key content should appear in content box)
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- Click Decrypt Password → The administrator password should now be displayed in the console. Write than or copy both the Public DNS address and the password in a save location
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- Click on Start\Run on your machine, type ‘mstsc’ and click OK
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- Enter the Public DNS address of the instance, click OK and you will prompted for username and password → Enter the username and password and you should now gain access to the instance
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Note: If you are accessing this from a domain machine, add .\ to the username (.\Administrator)
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I hope I have made these steps easy to follow and that it has been useful to someone…