How to take the backup of AWS NVMe block devices - amazon-ec2

I have recently purchased AWS E2 instance "m5ad.4xlarge", which has 3 disks out of which two are 300 GB NVMe SSD drives.
Now the problem is, these two disks are not available in AWS Volumes section and hence I am unable to trigger the snapshot for these volumes.
In the below screen shot if you would notice that I have total 3 volumes. The first disk nvme0n1 which is mounted as root is only visible in AWS volume section but other two disks nvme1n1 and nvme2n1 are not visible in AWS volumes section. Thanks in advance.

You can make and attach ebs volume for backup, and rsync data to it by cron.
Or, you can send all data from nvme to s3/glacier also by cron, and attach lificycle policy to bucket.

Related

How to take a backup of an SSD AWS [ec2]?

I have an m3 large. Although I can find the other EBS volumes associated with that instance in the Volumes Section.
But I am not able to find my 32GB SSD disk.
How can we take backup of this SSD?
It appears that you are referring to the Instance Store SSD volume that is provided as part of an m3.large Amazon EC2 instance.
Instance Store volumes are temporary (aka "ephemeral") and the content is lost when the instance is Stopped, Terminated or fails. Therefore, it is recommended only for temporary files and swap files. Be sure to copy off any data you wish to keep before the instance is Stopped.
Instance Store volumes are not the same as Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes. While EBS provides a snapshot capability, this is not available for Instance Store volumes.
Instead, you must copy off any data you wish to keep via normal filesystem commands, or run traditional backup software. There is no snapshot-like capability available for Instance Store volumes.

Running out of disk space EC2

I ran into some issues with my EC2 micro instance and had to terminate it and create a new one in its place. But it seems even though the old instance is no longer visible in the list, it is still using up some space on my disk. My df -h is listed below:
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use%
/dev/xvda1 7.8G 7.0G 719M 91% /
When I go to the EC22 console I see there are 3 volumes each 8gb in the list. One of them is attached (/dev/xvda) and this one is showing as "in-use". The other 2 are simply showing as "Available"
Is the terminated instance really using up my disk space? If yes, how to free it up?
I have just solved my problem by running this command:
sudo apt autoremove
and a lot of old packages are going to be removed, for instance many files like this linux-aws-headers-4.4.0-1028
Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBS) is a service that provides virtual disks for use with Amazon EC2. It is network-attached storage that persists even when an EC2 instance is stopped or terminated.
When launching an Amazon EC2 instance, a boot volume is automatically attached to the instance. The contents of the boot volume is copied from an Amazon Machine Image (AMI), which can be chosen from a pre-populated list (including the ability to create your own AMI).
When an Amazon EC2 instance is Stopped, all EBS volumes remain attached to the instance. This allows the instance to be Started with the same configuration as when it was stopped.
When an Amazon EC2 instance is Terminated, EBS volumes might or might not be deleted, based upon the Delete on Termination setting of each volume:
By default, boot volumes are deleted when an instance is terminated. This is because the volume was originally just a copy of an AMI, so there is unlikely to be any important data on the volume. (Hint: Don't store data on a boot volume.)
Additional volumes default to "do not delete on termination", on the assumption that they contain data that should be retained. When the instance is terminated, these volumes will remain in an Available state, ready to be attached to another instance.
So, if you do not require any content on your remaining EBS volumes, simply delete them. In future, when launching instances, keep an eye on the Delete on Termination setting to make the clean-up process simpler.
Please note that the df -h command is only showing currently-attached volumes. It is not showing the volumes in Available state, since they are not visible to that instance. The concept of "Disk Space" typical refers to the space within an EBS volume, while "EBS Storage" refers to the volumes themselves. So, the 7GB of the volume that is used is related to that specific (boot) volume.
If you are running out of space on an EBS volume, see: Expanding the Storage Space of an EBS Volume on Linux. Expanding the volume involves:
Creating a snapshot
Creating a new (bigger) volume from the snapshot
Swapping the disks (requiring a Stop/Start if you are swapping a boot volume)
These 2 steps add an extra hard drive to your EC2 and format it for use:
Attach an extra hard drive (EBS: Elastic Block Storage) to an EC2
Format an EBS drive attached to an EC2
Here's pricing info. Free Tier includes 30GB. Afterward it's $1.25/month for 10GB on a General Purpose SSD (gp2).
To see how much space you are using/need:
Check your current disk use/available in Linux with df -h.
Check the size of a directory in Linux with du -sh [path].

Can an existing device-name be given to a new EBS volume being attached to an Amazon EC2 instance?

Let's say there is a single disk Disk 0 at an Amazon EC2 instance Instance1 with the corresponding EBS volume having the device-name /dev/sd1. Let's say this disk maps to C-drive on the VM.
Now can we create a new EBS volume attach it to Instance1 with the same device-name /dev/sd1?
If this is possible, does it mean, after the volume is attached, we can go ahead and extend the existing C-drive at Instance1, without having to go through the process of detaching it first, creating a snapshot etc.?
If an EBS volume is already mounted at /dev/sd1, it is not possible to mount another volume as that device.
First, detach the existing volume, then attach a new volume.
To extend the size of an EBS volume:
Detach the EBS volume from the EC2 instance
Create Snapshot of the EBS volume
Create Volume from the snapshot, making the volume larger
Attach the new EBS volume to the EC2 instance
The disk partition will also need to be extended. This can be done with the Disk Management console (Windows) or with the resize2fs command (Linux).

Can I create an AMI that includes multiple ebs volumes (i.e. both sda and sdb)

I have an ebs-backed instance running on EC2. I'm using it to do some computationally intensive text processing on around 16Gb of data which is stored on sdb (i.e. the larger ebs volume associated with the instance).
I'd like to parallelized the processing by creating replicas of this instance, each with its own copy of the data. I can create an AMI from the instance but I need the image to include BOTH sda (the root ebs volume) AND ALSO sdb, which is the volume where all the data is. How can I make a replica of the whole package?
Creating an image in the AWS Management Console just copies sda (i.e. the root volume, which is too small to hold my data).
Is this even possible?
(PS: I don't even see the sdb volume in the AWS Management Console Elastic Block Store->Volumes panel)
Thanks!
I once needed this sort of setting where I had to setup a MySQL on a EBS backed machine with data store in a separate EBS Volume. The AMI had to be such that every time you instanciate it, it should have the data volume (with static data in it) attached. This is how I did:
Created an EBS backed instance from any existing image
Attached a EBS volume, performed mkfs, mounted on /database
Copied data to the volume, e.g. under /database/mysql
Created image of this setup from AMI web console.
Now, every time I launch this image, I see the volume with all the data is there. I just mount it on /database and things get going.
I am not sure, if this is helpful to you but your problem seemed to close to this.
Update after #NAD's comment
Yeah, AMI creation process excludes stuffs that are under
/sys
/proc
/dev
/media
/mnt
So, the trick is to not have stuffs that you want to bundle up with your AMI under these directories.
Also, if you have volume that you want to auto-mount at boot, register it in fstab

EBS root instances seem to not have any instance storage

EBS root instances seem to not have any instance storage - is this correct or some odd bug?
I'm expecting to have /dev/sda to be the EBS backed volume, and then have the other instance storage devices there as /dev/sdb etc...
Is this an incorrect assumption?
It's not a bug. Unlike Ephemeral, EBS based instances don't give you any free storage.
You can however create a new EBS volume and attach it to your instance.
Cheers
Ray
EDIT: I believe I led you astray as this seems to have changed. You still cannot attach local disk to an existing running instance but this does seem to be possible at launch time.
See:
http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/index.html?Using_AddingDefaultLocalInstanceStorageToAMI.html
Taken from the above url, device mapping with an 80gb EBS root volume plus ephemeral storage.
https://ec2.amazonaws.com/
?Action=RegisterImage
&Name=MyImage
&KernelId=aki-f70657b2
&RamdiskId=ari-ff0d5cba
&RootDeviceName=/dev/sda1
&BlockDeviceMapping.1.DeviceName=/dev/sda1
&BlockDeviceMapping.1.Ebs.SnapshotId=snap-12345678
&BlockDeviceMapping.1.Ebs.VolumeSize=80
&BlockDeviceMapping.1.Ebs.DeleteOnTermination=false
&BlockDeviceMapping.2.DeviceName=/dev/sdc
&BlockDeviceMapping.2.VirtualName=ephemeral0
&...auth parameters...

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