Amazon has recently launched a service called DevPay where commerical software like Virtualmin Pro can be purchased to run on their EC2 service. This means that instead of creating an EC2 instance and installing VM2 on it manually, you can instead use an image that has it pre-installed, and available for immediate use. We how have an AMI available that contains Cloudmin 2.6, with support for managing EC2 instances only.

Subscribers to the paid AMI for Cloudmin are charged $25 per calendar month. In addition, regular EC2 per-instance-hour and per-megabyte charges apply. And any additional instances you create using it will be charged at normal rates.

To use the Cloudmin paid AMI, the steps to follow are :

1. Sign up for an Amazon EC2 account on their registration page.
2. Follow Amazon's getting started instructions to install the needed tools, in particular the Prerequisites, Setting up an Account and Setting up the Tools pages.
3. Purchase the VM2 AMI subscription, which will be charged to your Amazon account.
4. Once you have the ec2 commands working, use the following command to list available Virtualmin AMIs :

   ec2-describe-images -o 541491349868

   You should see at least one in the available state.

5. Setup an SSH key with the commands :

   ec2-add-keypair vgpl-keypair >~/.ssh/id_rsa-vgpl-keypair
   chmod 700 ~/.ssh/id_rsa-vgpl-keypair

6. Start a new instance with the AMI for Virtualmin Pro with the command :

   ec2-run-instances ami-a5bf59cc -k vgpl-keypair

   This will output the new instance ID, which is like i-10a64379

7. Check its status with the command :

   ec2-describe-instances

   You will need to wait until it is in the running state. You will then be able to see the public hostname, which looks like ec2-72-44-33-55.z-2.compute-1.amazonaws.com .

8. Open the needed firewall ports with the commands :

   ec2-authorize default -p 22
   ec2-authorize default -p 25
   ec2-authorize default -p 10000
   ec2-authorize default -p 10001
   ec2-authorize default -p 10002
   ec2-authorize default -p 10003
   ec2-authorize default -p 10004
   ec2-authorize default -p 10005
   ec2-authorize default -p 10006
   ec2-authorize default -p 10007
   ec2-authorize default -p 10008
   ec2-authorize default -p 10009
   ec2-authorize default -p 53

9. Try a test SSH login with the command :

   ssh -i ~/.ssh/id_rsa-vgpl-keypair root@ec2-WHATEVER.compute-1.amazonaws.com

10. Connect to Webmin at the URL : https://ec2-WHATEVER.compute-1.amazonaws.com:10000/ . The initial login is root and password is changeme .
11. Click on the Webmin link in the top-left, open the Webmin category, click on Change Language and Theme, and enter a new password!
12. If some packages are not up to date, they will be displayed on the System Information page that appears after you login. Click the Install All Updates Now button to have them automatically fetched and installed.

The version of Cloudmin that the paid AMI installs doesn't have all the features of the full version, such as the ability to manage Xen instances, Linux Vservers and Solaris Zones. Instead, it is limited to creating, managing and protecting EC2 instances.

Before you use Cloudmin to control EC2 instances, you must add at least one account with the following steps :

1. Open the Amazon EC2 category on the left menu, and click on EC2 Accounts.
2. Click on Add an EC2 account, and on the form that appears fill in at least your Account ID, Access key ID and Secret access key. If you want to create new AMIs from EC2 instances, fill in the X509 fields too. All of this information can be found at http://aws.amazon.com/ under Your Web Services Account.
3. Click Create to add the new account. Cloudmin will display an error message if any of the details are invalid.

Cloudmin also needs at least one SSH key to login to EC2 instances it creates. To add one, do the following :

1. Open the Cloudmin Settings category on the left, and click on SSH Keys.
2. Click Add a new SSH key to bring up the key creation page.
3. Assuming that you want to use your existing EC2 SSH key for additional EC2 instances, select the Import existing EC2 key option and choose your key from EC2 from the adjacent menu.
4. Paste the private key text into the text box below, then click Create.

You can now create your first EC2 instance. Click reload in your browser to refresh the page, then open the New System category on the left and click Create EC2 instance. You should only need to select an AMI and enter a description, then click Create System to kick off the creation of the EC2 instance.

For the full VM2 documentation, see the VM2 Manual page. Ignore the sections related to Xen, Vservers and Zones, as they are not supported by this paid AMI.