When I launch the instance, it automatically comes with a 30GB "C: Drive" and some "Ephemeral" drives.
My question is
"...where is the expected 410GB hard drive?"
I noticed you can change the default 30GB to be some other size.
Is this where one can increase to up to 410GB?
Instance storage is not enabled by default:
Instances that use Amazon EBS for the root device do not, by default,
have instance store available at boot time. Also, you can't attach
instance store volumes after you've launched an instance. Therefore,
if you want your Amazon EBS-backed instance to use instance store
volumes, you must specify them using a block device mapping when you
create your AMI or launch your instance.
You will find this quote and more info about how to enable it in the AWS-EC2 User Guide. See the section "Making Instance Stores Available on Your Instances".
Related
I’m running a website on an m3.2xlarge AWS ec2 instance which is EBS backed.
I want to change the instance type to m2.2xlarge instance.
This new instance already has instance storage of 850 gb hdd.
My question is: can I attach the existing EBS drive to the new m2.2xlarge instance? and boot to the website?
There are 2 possibilities
1
stop your running Instance, Detach the volume (or take a snapshot of it)
Now while launching the new Instance you can add additional volume along with your Root volume (of new Instance). Just keep in mind you cannot delete or exclude the Root volume of new Instance while Launching, its just that you can add an extra volume along with the root volume
2
Stop your running Instance
Go to actions and then Select Insatnce Setting and then click on Change Instance Type
Select your desired Type of Instance
after changing the Type of instance, you can restart the Instance
Your existing EBS will remain attached after resizing. You will not get to see instance store which comes with m2.2xlarge. This won't get add up to resized instance. This is based on the documentation here:
When you resize an instance, the resized instance usually has the same
number of instance store volumes that you specified when you launched
the original instance. If you want to add instance store volumes, you
must migrate your application to a new instance with the instance type
and instance store volumes that you need
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.
I know it is a newbie question but the documentation is really not clear about that.
I have successfully launched a Cluster Instances Amazon Linux AMI 2011.02.1 cc1.4xlarge instance. I need to upload and process a 15 GB text file and I don't know how to activate the "additional" storage.
By default, I have just 8 GB of storage. Can someone help me writing simple and clear instruction on how to activate all the storage (1690 GB) I should have?
Thanks a lot in advance.
Regards,
Eugenio
You should be able to mount your ephemeral drives by following this guide.
Cheers.
It's a very common question and there's a large confusion that everyone has around this when starting to work with AWS EC2.
There are 2 things to have in mind here :
Instance Type
AMI (Amazon Machine Image, basically a disk snapshot with some operating system)
Each AMI has some requirements that will dictate parts of the configuration of your created instance.
Here we're concerned with the Root Device type of an AMI :
EBS-backed AMI
These AMI's only work on instances that have an EBS volume attached. And therefore if you choose an EBS-backed AMI, the wizard will by default add an EBS volume (usually of size 8 GiB) without you noticing, and you'll be charged for this EBS separately in addition to the EC2 hourly charge. In this case when you ssh to your instance you will only find 8 GiBs of storage and not the large storage you're promised when you view the EC2 Pricing table at https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/ . And that is confusing.
If you also want to use your -usually large- instance store with these AMIs, then when you create that instance you have to explicitly add a volume and select Instance Store 0 from Volume Type (in Step 4 - Add Storage). You may have more than 1 drives assigned to your instance type, you need to add all of them in this case (Instance Store 0,1,..etc). These volumes can only be added at creation time. If the volumes were automatically mounted then you'll find them at /media/ephemral*, if not, you'll have to mount them manually.
Instance-Store-backed AMI
Those images use the Instance Storage as their root device (the OS will be installed on the instance store at / ). I think the confusion comes from the fact that these AMI's are not instantly viewable in the Quick Start tab of Step 1 at which you choose the AMI. All AMIs in the Quick Start tab are EBS-backed, and Instance Store AMIs are very uncommon these days, everyone uses EBS-backed AMIs because of their various speed and persistence benefits, and that's recommended by Amazon as well.
If you want an instance-store-backed AMI to avoid dealing with any EBS whatsoever, then in Step 1, choose the tab Community AMIs, and filter them by Root Device Type = Instance Store, then choose your AMI. Whether or not you add Instance Store 0 in Step 4 - Add Storage, the instance store will be available.
Check what Amazon Linux AMI type you're launching the image as. In my experience, if you launch with the "EBS-backed" AMI type, it won't mount the ephemeral storage. If you switch to the "Instance Store" type, it will mount it for you at /media/ephemeral0
http://aws.amazon.com/amazon-linux-ami/
I understand that when I launch an instance on ec2, that the instance has to be located on a particular data center, and that after launching you can't change that. I also understand that an AMI is created from an instance.
But what I dont understand, is when I launch an instance from an AMI, why can't I specify what region I want it to run on? Seems like it shouldnt matter, once the AMI is created you should be able to launch it in any region. What does the AMI contain that ties it to a region and why?
Kernels. The kernel IDs change across regions (don't ask me why).
Meaning an AMI which specifies a kernel ID to be booted with can only be booted in the region this kernel ID exists.
AMI is region specific because AMI basically contains a software configuration (for example, an operating system, an application server, and applications). From an AMI, you launch an instance, which is a copy of the AMI running as a virtual server in the cloud. And if we consider AMI a global service, it means all AMIs are stored in one place and have access to all regions. For this, it will take more time to pull and then create instances. So if it is available in a region(region-specific), then we can quickly launch instances fast without time delay.
Amazon's new EBS-based EC2 instances have two options to shutdown: terminate or stop. Stopped instances can be later started again, automatically continuing from the same EBS root disk state they had when they were stopped.
But what happens when an Amazon datacenter has a hardware failure, and the EC2 instance is forced to shutdown. Does it terminate or stop? If the instance has been configured to stop by default on shutdown, can I rely on it being stopped also in this situation, and being able to start it again later?
An EC2 instance can be terminated at any time and one must account for this indeed, as already mentioned in David's answer (+1). You can arrange for a failed instance's Elastic Block Store (EBS) to remain available regardless though, see e.g. the respective FAQ What happens to my data when a system terminates?:
The data stored on a local instance store will persist only as long as
that instance is alive. However, data that is stored on an Amazon EBS
volume will persist independently of the life of the instance. If you
are using an Amazon EBS volume as a root partition, then you have set
the Delete On Terminate flag to "N" for your Amazon EBS volume to
persist outside the life of the instance. [emphasis mine]
This is explained in more detail in section 2. Delete on Termination within Eric Hammond's recommended article Three Ways to Protect EC2 Instances from Accidental Termination and Loss of Data:
Though EBS volumes created and attached to an instance at
instantiation are preserved through a “stop”/”start” cycle, by default
they are destroyed and lost when an EC2 instance is terminated. This
behavior can be changed with a delete-on-termination boolean value
buried in the documentation for the --block-device-mapping option of
ec2-run-instances.
He is referring to the ec2-run-instances documentation, and all this is meanwhile illustrated in more detail within Amazon EC2 Root Device Storage Concepts as well:
By default, the root device volume and the other volumes created when
an Amazon EBS-backed instance is launched are automatically deleted
when the instance terminates [...]. You can change
the default behavior by setting the DeleteOnTermination flag to the
value you want when you launch the instance. For an example of how to
change the flag at launch time, see Using Amazon EC2 Root Device Storage.
I assume you mean the CPU related hardware fails, rather than the network disk. The way I treat EC2 is to create a system that can go up and down without data loss. Anything important you should use an S3 bucket, not EBS.