HowTo: Change Instance store AMI to EBS-backend AMI

Posted on March 11, 2014 Updated on March 11, 2014

Amazon not providing any feature for changing AMI root device type, once we generate an instance with Instance-store  we can’t upgrade the instance because for upgrading instance should stop. The stop option is disable for such instance-store AMI’s. I followed the steps below, It can be workout by two ways either using rsync or dd

Here is the steps:

• Create an EBS vol with size as same or more, I used 10G because my existing instance having 10G on root.

After creating which is look like this

• Attach the EBSLogin to existing Instance-store backend AMI,

Right- click and select Attach Volume,

• Login to the Instance-store backend  server, and stop all the running services (Optional), (eg., mysqld , httpd , xinted )

Execute the the disk mirroring commands below, it will take few min to complete according to the server perfomance.

[root@ip-10-128-5-222 ~]# dd bs=65536 if=/dev/sda1 of=/dev/sdf

or

mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdf                              #create filesystem
mkdir /mnt/ebs                                  #New dir for mounting 
mount /dev/sdh /mnt/ebs                         #Mount as a partition
rsync -avHx / /mnt/ebs                          #Synchronizing root and ebs  
rsync -avHx /dev /mnt/ebs                       #Synchronizing device informations  
tune2fs -L '/' /dev/sdf                         #Creating partition label for ebs  
sync;sync;sync;sync && umount /mnt/ebs          #Sync and umounting ebs 

Check the EBS volume for consistency

[root@ip-10-128-5-222 ~]# fsck /dev/sdf
 fsck 1.39 (29-May-2006)
 e2fsck 1.39 (29-May-2006)
 /dev/sdf: clean, 126372/1310720 files, 721346/2621440 blocks

Mount the EBS volume into the instance, Remove the /mnt entry from the fstab on your EBS vol

[root@ip-10-128-5-222 ~]# mount /dev/sdf /mnt/ebs-vol
[root@ip-10-128-5-222 ~]# vim /root/ebs-vol/etc/fstab

• Create a snapshot of the EBS volume using the AWS management console

Right-Click the EBS_vol –> select Create Snapshot , it will take few min to create

After creating snapshot it will list under snapshot list.

Now Right-click snapshot  –> select Create Image from snapshot

• Launch new EC2 using newly create AMI, so while creating new EC2 you can select any instance type also you may use the same keypair and Elastic IP for the new instance

Creating New instance using new AMI.

Running instance

• Now you can login to the new server, If you select more than the size of snapshot you have to use the below command to retain the storage back

#resize2fs /dev/sda1

•  Successfully migrated the server as EBS-backend. Start all the services if it is necessary, This time we can upgrade the instance type