I would like to increase the size of EC2 disk space on AWS.
I have Redhat AMI that is connected to this volume.
What is the best way to increase the space (without losing the data)?
You can attached EBS to it.
This is a network based disk that you can create and then attach it to the instance. You can later detach it and attach it again to this or other instances. You can also take snapshot of this disk as backup or to create new EBS from it.
Related
I created two virtual disks for AWS EC2. One is 16G and the other is 100G.
When I connect to EC2 with puTTy it does not show the disks that I created.
Anyone know what the problem is or how to fix it? Thanks.
Make an Amazon EBS volume available for use on Linux
After you attach an Amazon EBS volume to your instance, it is exposed as a block device. You can format the volume with any file system and then mount it. After you make the EBS volume available for use, you can access it in the same ways that you access any other volume. Any data written to this file system is written to the EBS volume and is transparent to applications using the device.
Depending on your requirement you can choose two ways:
Format and mount an attached volume
Automatically mount an
attached volume after reboot
I am new to AWS EC2 and I have just purchased a t3 medium reserved instance. I would like to add 100 GB of SSD storage to my instance and use it as the instance's primary hard disk. How can I do this? I did not see any option of adding and configuring the SSD disk when I purchased the instance.
I have purchased a linux/unix instance without any AMI. I intend to install Ubuntu 18.04 as the OS. Please advise.
In AWS your SSD disk is known as an EBS Volume.
To update the volume size you would from the EC2 console want to find your current volume and right click on it. Then click modify volume and select your new size.
If you haven't created your instance yet you can specify the size during the wizard.
Using ec2 Windows instance with Instance storage (let's say 32GB SSD) - where OS and its settings are stored? Like Program Files, User profiles. Are they all stored on Instance Storage? As far as I understood from other topics Instance storage is not-persistent and doesn't survive shutdowns/terminations. Does that mean I will lose everything under C: drive if I turn it off?
Can I use EBS storage as a default storage for OS (C drive)? Can I map multiple EBS storages to one Windows storage?
If above is true, then I will be charged for the capacity used by OS on EBS instance? It would be around 20GB I believe. Is that correct?
I am quite new in aws, and before paying for such instances or EBS I would like to know how this technical and billing model is working.
Thank you!
The Storage for the Root device is dependent on the AMI (EBS-Backed or Instance Store-Backed) used to launch the instance.
As far as I understood from other topics Instance storage is
not-persistent and doesn't survive shutdowns/terminations.
If the Root storage device is Instance Store, Stopping (shutdown) the instance is not possible. On termination, Both the storage and Instance does not survive. The Instance does not survive once terminated even if the AMI is EBS-Backed, but you can persist the Root Volume by setting the DeleteOnTermination flag set to False.
Does that mean I will lose everything under C: drive if I turn it off?
You cannot turn off (shutdown) an Instance Store-backed instance.
Can I use EBS storage as a default storage for OS (C drive)?
Yes, Choose an EBS backed Windows AMI.
Can I map multiple EBS storages to one Windows storage?
Yes, multiple EBS Volumes can be attached to one EC2 Windows Instance.
If above is true, then I will be charged for the capacity used by OS
on EBS instance?
You will be charged for the total size of the EBS volumes attached to the instance including the Root Device.
It would be around 20GB I believe. Is that correct?
The EBS Volume Size is adjustable. The upper Size limit is 16TiB.
Read Storage for Root Device and Ec2 Root Device Volume
Please spend more time on the AWS documentation, I don't think here is enough to cover all your question.
Only for specify EC2 instance come with attached SSD storage AKA instance storage. Bare in mind that, this instance storage doesn't come with Snapshot capabilities, so you must backup the file yourself. This is mean for people who need fastest disk access to process their data.
Only EBS allow you do multiple snapshot.
You can always create an AMI image for your instance after complete the deployment. AMI image is store inside EBS, so you will not lost the initial instance if you do this, so for new instance, you just trigger load it from AMI.
If you "Terminate" an instance, it will delete the virtual image. There is no way to recover it even with EBS, unless you make a snapshot. However, attached EBS storage will not be deleted.
EBS is calculate by Per GB and give you 1GB x 3 IOPS, with base 100 IOPS given. This is not enough if anyone want to carry out disk I/O intensive task.
I am trying to create a backup mechanism for our server, so that if my system crashes, I should be able to create the whole system by running a single script
After going through Amazon documentation, this is my understanding of creating a backup and restoring
Backup
Create a AMI Image (this can be updated monthly)
Create a snapshot (This can be done using a daily script creating a snapshot)
Restore (A script to)
Create an EBS instance using AMI
Attach the EBS volume to Instance created
Now my Questions are
Is it the best way to take a backup and restore?
Do we actually need to backup 2 things, AMI and EBS volume (using snapshot), Can we just keep snapshots?
I understand this cannot work for a local instance store instance, as there is no snapshot functionality. So how can I create a backup and restore process for local instance store instances?
As I could not find any better alternative, I am sticking with the initial approach.
For EBS
Backup:
Create a AMI Image (this can be updated monthly).
Create a snapshot (This can be done using a daily script creating a snapshot).
Restore (A script to)
Create an EBS instance using AMI.
Attach the EBS volume to Instance created.
For instance store, I am only keeping the application (no database), so no need to keep a backup of that.
EBS Snapshots are an excellent way to create backups.
You can perform frequent Snapshots of your EBS Volumes via scripts. Weekly, Daily, Hourly, or as frequently as your Credit Card will allow. The only limit is around how many simultaneous snapshots you can be doing - when you hit that, the EBS API will start giving back errors until a few of the in-flight operations complete.
Snapshots can also be copied from Region to Region in order to provide backup against a catastrophic event.
When you snapshot an EBS volume, that snapshot is of the entire volume. Even if it was created from an AMI, your snapshot contains everything you need to create a new instance of the volume. You can pretty easily try this yourself.
If your instances are Linux based, there is no need to create an AMI if you're taking snapshots. You can create the AMI on the fly, from the snapshots, when you need to recover. If you got that process automated, it's pretty easy to do.
In Windows there is a limitation not allowing to launch an EC2 instance from a snapshot, so AMIs must be used. There are ways to workaround that limitation: You can check out the this post I wrote in our company's blog:
http://www.n2ws.com/blog/3-ways-ec2-windows-backup-and-recovery.html
I would suggest to use Auto Scaling in addition to EBS snapshots. If Instance is dying because of Hardware failure or it's scheduled for retirement by Amazon, Auto Scaling will start new Instance automatically.
But in this case, you have to setup NAS for your dynamic data. Depending on Server Load, the number of running Instances will be different and all your scaling servers must mount NAS storage which is shared across them.
Your Database should be on separate server or servers as well. Or you might want to use Amazon RDS as it has great auto-backup / Point-In-Time-Restore features, but you have to pay extra for that.
1) Yes.Snapshot is best way to backup and restore EBS volumes.
2) Depends, if you have the root volume as EBS backed AMI, then you can snapshot them as well and improves the manageability
3) Rsync and AMI is the option available for instance store
I have two amazon ec2 instances, (1) using SLES and running my current site, and (2) a new one using Amazon Linux. I am simply trying to move my site from the SLES and then retire it.
I have a 100GB EBS volume attached to the SLES server of which only about 20GB is actually used. What's the best way to bring the data over to the new instance?
create a new EBS volume of about 30GB and attach to new instance, use unix cp?
create a new EBS volume of about 30GB and attach to new instance, temporarily also attach the 100GB original volume the new instance, use unix cp?
something smarter/simpler, such as create a snapshot(?) of the 100GB EBS volume, somehow? create a new 30GB EBS volume out of it, and then attach that to the new instance? The extra benefit will be that I won't have to take down my site
Thanks a lot
It is easy to increase the size of a target volume, but the only way you're going to be able to make it smaller is to create a blank volume of the size you want. Then, either mount the new one to the old instance and do a copy or detach the old volume and reattach it to the new and do a copy. Basically, of the options you listed, only the first and second ones would work. The reason making a snapshot won't work is because creating a snapshot from a volume makes the snapshot the same size as the volume it was created from. You would get an error trying to create a volume from snapshot that is smaller than the original.