Yearly Archives: 2009

Enlarge Amazon EBS Volume

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The easiest way enlarge an EBS volume is obviously by creating a snapshot ,create a new volume using that snapshot with a higher capacity. Unfortunately, once you mount the new EBS volume,you will notice that it’s size is the same. Below are the tips how to fix it.

If filesystem of the volume is EXT3:

I got a chance to create a snapshot of 200Gb EBS volume previously formatted using EXT3. After the snapshot which takes a little longer, need to create another 500GB volume from the snapshot because the older EBS about to be filled up with more data. Following steps posted by izyboyd found at:

Procedure to enlarge ext3 EBS volume from snapshot

Update: Commands for enalarging EXT3

 umount /mnt/ebs1 
# ElasticFox -> volumes -> right click -> create a new snapshot from this volume 
# ElasticFox -> snapshots -> right click -> create new volume from this snapshot (with increased size) 
# ElasticFox -> volumes -> right click ->; attach /dev/sdi 
fdisk /dev/sdi 
# Type 'd' to delete the primary partition 
# Type 'n' for new partition 
# Type 'p' for primary 
# Type '1' for 1st 
# Type Enter for 1st cylinder 
# Type Enter for last cylinder (full disk) 
# Partition is not bootable, so 'a' not necessary 
# Type 'w' to finish 
e2fsck -f /dev/sdi 
resize2fs -p /dev/sdi  
fsck -f -y /dev/sdi  
mount -t ext3 /dev/sdi  /mnt/ebs1

It’s was easy, though the time it takes to snapshot and wait for e2fsck command to finish takes sometime. I leave it overnight to finish the process. It’s important to do e2fsck to the new volume to ensure integrity of data.

If filesystem of the volume is XFS:

While EXT3 volume need to be unmounted while executing the resize, XFS is very simple and can be resize while it’s mounted and live using the command xfs_growfs.

The link of the post messages is at:
Increase XFS EBS volume size

Update: Commands for enlarging XFS 

 umount /mnt/ebs1 
# ElasticFox -> volumes -> right click -> create a new snapshot from this volume 
# ElasticFox -> snapshots-> right click -> create new volume from this snapshot (with increased size) 
# ElasticFox -> volumes -> right click -> attach /dev/sdi 
mount /dev/sdi /mnt/ebs1 
xfs_growfs /mnt/ebs1

Whether using EXT3 or XFS in the next volume in EC2, the links above are very helpful. Anybody have a chance snapshotting bigger than 500GB volume? How long does it takes for you to finish?

Introducing Monitoring, Auto Scaling and Elastic Load Balancing for Amazon EC2

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“New Features for Amazon EC2: Elastic Load Balancing, Auto Scaling, and Amazon CloudWatch

We are working to make it even easier for you to build sophisticated, scalable, and robust web applications using AWS. As soon as you launch some EC2 instances, you want visibility into resource utilization and overall performance. You want your application to be able to scale on demand based on traffic and system load. You want to spread the incoming traffic across multiple web servers for high availability and better performance. You want to focus on building an application that takes advantage of the powerful infrastructure available in the cloud, while avoiding system administration and operational burdens (“The Muck,” as Jeff Bezos once called it).” -Amazon Web Services

Now, that AWS has this services, it’s good to play this new services and put to production. A web interface would be great though, maybe something that contains information about scaled running and monitored instances inside AWS.

For companies like RightScale, Scalr and and others AWS management providers, how it will affect their business?