Growing Amazon EBS Volume sizes [closed]

Answer 1

All great recommendations, and I thought I'd add this article I found, which relates to expanding a Windows Amazon EC2 EBS instance using the Amazon Web UI tools to perform the necessary changes. If you're not comfortable using CLI, this will make your upgrade much easier.

http://www.tekgoblin.com/2012/08/27/aws-guides-how-to-resize-a-ec2-windows-ebs-volume/

Thanks to TekGoblin for posting this article.

Answer 2

You can't simply 'bump in' more space on the fly if you need it, but you can resize the partition with a snapshot.

Steps do to this:

1. unmount ebs volume
2. create a ebs snapshot
3. add new volume with more space
4. recreate partition table and resize filesystem
5. mount the new ebs volume

Look at http://aws.amazon.com/ebs/ - EBS Snapshot:

Snapshots can also be used to instantiate multiple new volumes, expand the size of a volume or move volumes across Availability Zones. When a new volume is created, there is the option to create it based on an existing Amazon S3 snapshot. In that scenario, the new volume begins as an exact replica of the original volume. By optionally specifying a different volume size or a different Availability Zone, this functionality can be used as a way to increase the size of an existing volume or to create duplicate volumes in new Availability Zones. If you choose to use snapshots to resize your volume, you need to be sure your file system or application supports resizing a device.

Answer 3

Use command "diskpart" for Windows OS, have a look here : Use http://support.microsoft.com/kb/300415 Following are the steps I followed for a non-root disk (basic not dynamic disk)

Once you have taken a snapshot, dismounted the old EBS volume (say 600GB) and created a larger EBS volume (say 1TB) and mounted this new EBS volume - you would have to let Windows know of the resizing (from 600GB to 1TB) so at command prompt (run as administrator)

diskpart.exe

select disk=9

select volume=Z

extend

[my disk 9,volume labelled Z, was a volume of size 1TB created from an ec2-snapshot of size 600GB - I wanted to resize 600GB to 1TB and so could follow the above steps to do this.]

Answer 4

if your root volume is xfs file system then then run this command xfs_growfs /

Answer 5

My steps:

1. stop the instance
2. find the ebs volume attached to the instance and create a snapshot of it

3. create a new volume with bigger disk space using the above snapshot. Unfortunately the UI on the aws console to create a snapshot is almost unusable because it's listing all the snapshots on aws. Using command line tool is a lot easier, like this:

   ec2-create-volume -s 100 --snapshot snap-a31fage -z us-east-1c
   

4. detach the existing ebs (smaller) volume from the instance

5. attach the new (bigger) volume to the instance, and make sure attach it to the same device the instance is expecting (in my case it is /dev/sda1)
6. start the instance

You are done!

Other than step 3 above, you can do everything using the aws management console.

Also NOTE as mentioned here:

https://serverfault.com/questions/365605/how-do-i-access-the-attached-volume-in-amazon-ec2

the device on your ec2 instance might be /dev/xv* while aws web console tells you it's /dev/s*.