Moving Your Volumes to a Different Gateway

As your data and performance needs grow, you might want to move your volumes to a different Volume Gateway. To do so, you can detach and attach a volume by using the Storage Gateway console or API.

By detaching and attaching a volume, you can do the following:

• Move your volumes to better host platforms or newer Amazon EC2 instances.

• Refresh the underlying hardware for your server.

• Move your volumes between hypervisor types.

When you detach a volume, your gateway uploads and stores the volume data and metadata to the Storage Gateway service in AWS. You can easily attach a detached volume to a gateway on any supported host platform later.

Note

A detached volume is billed at the standard volume storage rate until you delete it. For information about how to reduce your bill, see Reducing the Amount of Billed Storage on a Volume.

Note

There are some limitations for attaching and detaching volumes:

• Detaching a volume can take a long time. When you detach a volume, the gateway uploads all the data on the volume to AWS before the volume is detached. The time it takes for the upload to complete depends on how much data needs to be uploaded and your network connectivity into AWS.

• If you detach a cached volume, you can't reattach it as a stored volume.

• If you detach a stored volume, you can't reattach it as a cached volume.

• A detached volume can't be used until it is attached to a gateway.

• When you attach a stored volume, it needs to fully restore before you can attach it to a gateway.

• When you start attaching or detaching a volume, you need to wait till the operation completed before you use the volume.

• Currently, forcibly deleting a volume is only supported in the API.

• If you delete a gateway while your volume is detaching from that gateway, it results in data loss. Wait until the volume detach operation is complete before you delete the gateway.

• If a stored gateway is in restoring state, you can't detach a volume from it.

The following steps show you how to detach and attach a volume using the Storage Gateway console. For more information about doing this using the API, see DetachVolume or AttachVolume in the AWS Storage Gateway API Reference.

To detach a volume from a gateway

1. Open the Storage Gateway console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/storagegateway/home.

2. Choose Volumes, the select one or more volumes to detach.

3. For Actions, choose Detach volume. The confirmation dialog box appears.

4. Verify that you want to detach the specified volumes, then type the word detach in the confirmation box and choose Detach.

   Note

   If a volume that you detach has a lot of data on it, it transitions from Attached to Detaching status until it finishes uploading all the data. Then the status changes to Detached. For small amounts of data, you might not see the Detaching status. If the volume doesn't have data on it, the status changes from Attached to Detached.

You can now attach the volume to a different gateway.

To attach a volume to a gateway

1. Open the Storage Gateway console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/storagegateway/home.

2. On the navigation pane, choose Volumes. The status of each volume that is detached shows as Detached.

3. From the list of detached volumes, choose the volume that you want to attach. You can attach only one volume at a time.

4. For Actions, choose Attach volume.

5. In the Attach Volume dialog box, choose the gateway that you want to attach the volume to, and then enter the iSCSI target that you want to connect the volume to.

   If you are attaching a stored volume, enter its disk identifier for Disk ID.

6. Choose Attach volume. If a volume that you attach has a lot of data on it, it transitions from Detached to Attached if the AttachVolume operation succeeds.

7. In the Configure CHAP authentication wizard that appears, enter the Initiator name, Initiator secret, and Target secret, and then choose Save. For more information about working with Challenge-Handshake Authentication Protocol (CHAP) authentication, see Configuring CHAP Authentication for Your iSCSI Targets.