How to update NVMe and ENA Driver for ec2

Update the driver in existing instance (both linux and windows) before changing to new instance type.

As you already know AWS has introduced the following instances which are based on their own Hypervisor — nitro

A1, C5, C5d, C5n, M5, M5a, M5d, p3dn.24xlarge, R5, R5a, R5d, T3, and z1d

Bare metal: i3.metal, m5.metal, m5d.metal, r5.metal, r5d.metal, u-6tb1.metal, u-9tb1.metal, u-12tb1.metal, and z1d.metal

Although new AMI released by AWS/partner has got the new driver, you cannot just change existing instance to the new type to get advantage of it, unless you update driver and modify ec2 metadata to let it know that it has the drivers to use the new hypervisor.

To download and install the latest AWS NVMe driver for Windows (2008 R2 or later)

1. Connect to your instance and log in as the local administrator.
   2. Download the latest driver package to the instance.
   3. Extract the zip archive.
   4. Install the driver by running the install.ps1 PowerShell script.
   5. If the installer does not reboot your instance for you, restart the instance.

To install/update the NVMe driver in Linux

1. Connect to your instance.
2. Update your package cache to get necessary package updates as follows.

For Amazon Linux 2, Amazon Linux, CentOS, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux:

sudo yum update -y

For Ubuntu and Debian:

sudo apt-get update -y

Ubuntu 16.04 and later include the linux-aws package, which contains the NVMe and ENA drivers required by Nitro-based instances. Upgrade the linux-aws package to receive the latest version as follows:

sudo apt-get upgrade -y linux-aws

For Ubuntu 14.04, you can install the latest linux-aws package as follows:

sudo apt-get install linux-aws

3. Reboot your instance to load the latest kernel version.

4. sudo reboot

To download and install the latest ENA driver for Windows (2008 R2 or later)

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

2.[Windows Server 2016 and later] Run the following EC2Launch PowerShell script to configure the instance after the driver is installed.