When exporting instances and volumes, there are certain limitations and considerations you need to be aware of:
Supported Image Formats: You are required to export your instances and volumes in a format that is supported by your virtualization environment. The following formats are supported:
Limitations on Third-Party Software: Instances containing third-party software provided by AWS cannot be exported. This includes instances like Windows or SQL Server instances, as well as instances created from images in the AWS Marketplace.
Encrypted Snapshots and Instance Store Volumes: Instances with encrypted EBS snapshots in the block device mapping or instance store volumes in the block device mapping cannot be exported.
EBS Volume Export: You can only export EBS volumes that are specified in the block device mapping. EBS volumes attached after instance launch cannot be exported.
AMI Deletion and Export: If you’ve deleted the AMI or the EBS snapshot associated with the AMI, you cannot export an instance launched from an imported image. To resolve this, create a new AMI from the instance and then export the AMI.
Multiple Virtual Disks and Network Interfaces: Instances with multiple virtual disks or more than one network interface cannot be exported.
Shared Instances: You cannot export an instance from Amazon EC2 if it has been shared from another AWS account.
Conversion Task Limit: By default, you cannot have more than 5 conversion tasks per Region in progress simultaneously. However, this limit can be adjusted to a maximum of 20.
Volume Size Limit: Exporting VMs with volumes larger than 1 TiB is not supported.
Exporting to Encrypted S3 Buckets: You can export a volume to either an unencrypted S3 bucket or to a bucket encrypted using SSE-S3. Exporting to an S3 bucket encrypted using SSE-KMS is not supported.