AWS NVMe drivers for Windows instances

EBS volumes and instance store volumes are exposed as NVMe block devices on Nitro-based instances. You must have the AWS NVMe driver installed in order to use an NVMe block device. The latest AWS Windows AMIs for Windows Server 2008 R2 and later contain the required AWS NVMe driver.

For more information about EBS and NVMe, see Amazon EBS and NVMe on Windows instances. For more information about SSD instance store and NVMe, see SSD instance store volumes.

Install or upgrade AWS NVMe drivers

If you are not using the latest AWS Windows AMIs provided by Amazon, use the following procedure to install the current AWS NVMe driver. You should perform this update at a time when it is convenient to reboot your instance. Either the install script will reboot your instance or you must reboot it as the final step.

Prerequisites

PowerShell 3.0 or later

To download and install the latest AWS NVMe driver

1. We recommend that you create an AMI as a backup as follows, in case you need to roll back your changes.

   1. When you stop an instance, the data on any instance store volumes is erased. Before you stop an instance, verify that you've copied any data that you need from your instance store volumes to persistent storage, such as Amazon EBS or Amazon S3.

   2. In the navigation pane, choose Instances.

   3. Select the instance that requires the driver upgrade, and choose Instance state, Stop instance.

   4. After the instance is stopped, select the instance, choose Actions, then Image and templates, and then choose Create image.

   5. Choose Instance state, Start instance.

2. Connect to your instance and log in as the local administrator.

3. Download and extract the drivers to your instance using one of the following options:

   • Using a browser:

     1. Download the latest driver package to the instance.

     2. Extract the zip archive.

   • Using PowerShell:

     invoke-webrequest https://s3.amazonaws.com/ec2-windows-drivers-downloads/NVMe/Latest/AWSNVMe.zip -outfile $env:USERPROFILE\nvme_driver.zip
     expand-archive $env:userprofile\nvme_driver.zip -DestinationPath $env:userprofile\nvme_driver

4. Install the driver to your instance by running the install.ps1 PowerShell script from the nvme_driver directory (.\install.ps1). If you get an error, make sure you are using PowerShell 3.0 or later.

5. If the installer does not reboot your instance, reboot the instance.

AWS NVMe driver version history

The following table describes the released versions of the AWS NVMe driver.

Driver version	Details	Release date
1.3.2	Fixed issue with modifying EBS volumes actively processing IO, which may result in data corruption. Customers who do not modify online EBS volumes (for example, resizing or changing type) are not impacted.	10 September 2019
1.3.1	Reliability Improvements	21 May 2019
1.3.0	Device optimization improvements	31 August 2018
1.2.0	Performance and reliability improvements for AWS NVMe devices on all supported instances, including bare metal instances	13 June 2018
1.0.0	AWS NVMe driver for supported instance types running Windows Server	12 February 2018

Subscribe to notifications

Amazon SNS can notify you when new versions of EC2 Windows Drivers are released. Use the following procedure to subscribe to these notifications.

To subscribe to EC2 notifications from the console

1. Open the Amazon SNS console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/sns/v3/home.

2. In the navigation bar, change the Region to US East (N. Virginia), if necessary. You must select this Region because the SNS notifications that you are subscribing to are in this Region.

3. In the navigation pane, choose Subscriptions.

4. Choose Create subscription.

5. In the Create subscription dialog box, do the following:

   1. For TopicARN, copy the following Amazon Resource Name (ARN):

      arn:aws:sns:us-east-1:801119661308:ec2-windows-drivers

   2. For Protocol, choose Email.

   3. For Endpoint, type an email address that you can use to receive the notifications.

   4. Choose Create subscription.

6. You'll receive a confirmation email. Open the email and follow the directions to complete your subscription.

Whenever new EC2 Windows drivers are released, we send notifications to subscribers. If you no longer want to receive these notifications, use the following procedure to unsubscribe.

To unsubscribe from Amazon EC2 Windows driver notification

1. Open the Amazon SNS console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/sns/v3/home.

2. In the navigation pane, choose Subscriptions.

3. Select the checkbox for the subscription and then choose Actions, Delete subscriptions. When prompted for confirmation, choose Delete.

To subscribe to EC2 notifications using the AWS CLI

To subscribe to EC2 notifications with the AWS CLI, use the following command.

aws sns subscribe --topic-arn arn:aws:sns:us-east-1:801119661308:ec2-windows-drivers --protocol email --notification-endpoint [e-mail]

To subscribe to EC2 notifications using AWS Tools for Windows PowerShell

To subscribe to EC2 notifications with AWS Tools for Windows PowerShell, use the following command.

Connect-SNSNotification -TopicArn 'arn:aws:sns:us-east-1:801119661308:ec2-windows-drivers' -Protocol email -Region us-east-1 -Endpoint '[e-mail]'