Prerequisites - Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud

Prerequisites

AWS Regions

Supported in all AWS Regions except Canada West (Calgary).

Wavelength Zones and AWS Outposts

Not supported.

Local Zones

Supported in all Local Zones.

Instance types

Supported for all virtualized instances built on the Nitro System.

Not supported on bare metal instances.

Grant access

You must complete the configuration tasks to grant access to the EC2 Serial Console. For more information, see Configure access to the EC2 Serial Console.

Support for browser-based client

To connect to the serial console using the browser-based client, your browser must support WebSocket. If your browser does not support WebSocket, connect to the serial console using your own key and an SSH client.

Instance state

Must be running.

You can't connect to the serial console if the instance is in the pending, stopping, stopped, shutting-down, or terminated state.

For more information about the instance states, see Instance lifecycle.

Amazon EC2 Systems Manager

If the instance uses Amazon EC2 Systems Manager, then SSM Agent version 3.0.854.0 or later must be installed on the instance. For information about SSM Agent, see Working with SSM Agent in the AWS Systems Manager User Guide.

sshd server

You do not need an sshd server installed or running on your instance.

Configure your chosen troubleshooting tool

To troubleshoot your Windows instance via the serial console, you can use the Special Admin Console (SAC). Before you can use SAC, you must first enable SAC and the boot menu on every instance on which you'll use it.

For the instructions to configure your chosen troubleshooting tool on Linux, see Configure your chosen troubleshooting tool in the Amazon EC2 User Guide for Linux Instances.

Enable SAC and the boot menu

Note

If you enable SAC on an instance, the EC2 services that rely on password retrieval will not work from the Amazon EC2 console. Windows on Amazon EC2 launch agents (EC2Config, EC2Launch v1, and EC2Launch v2) rely on the serial console to execute various tasks. These tasks do not perform successfully when you enable SAC on an instance. For more information about Windows on Amazon EC2 launch agents, see Configure your Windows instance. If you enable SAC, you can disable it later. For more information, see Disable SAC and the boot menu.

Use one of the following methods to enable SAC and the boot menu on an instance.

PowerShell
To enable SAC and the boot menu on a Windows instance
  1. Connect to your instance and perform the following steps from an elevated PowerShell command line.

  2. Enable SAC.

    bcdedit /ems '{current}' on bcdedit /emssettings EMSPORT:1 EMSBAUDRATE:115200
  3. Enable the boot menu.

    bcdedit /set '{bootmgr}' displaybootmenu yes bcdedit /set '{bootmgr}' timeout 15 bcdedit /set '{bootmgr}' bootems yes
  4. Apply the updated configuration by rebooting the instance.

    shutdown -r -t 0
Command prompt
To enable SAC and the boot menu on a Windows instance
  1. Connect to your instance and perform the following steps from the command prompt.

  2. Enable SAC.

    bcdedit /ems {current} on bcdedit /emssettings EMSPORT:1 EMSBAUDRATE:115200
  3. Enable the boot menu.

    bcdedit /set {bootmgr} displaybootmenu yes bcdedit /set {bootmgr} timeout 15 bcdedit /set {bootmgr} bootems yes
  4. Apply the updated configuration by rebooting the instance.

    shutdown -r -t 0