How to update NVMe and ENA Driver for ec2

Ripon Banik
4 min readMar 13, 2019

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:

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Ripon Banik
Ripon Banik

Written by Ripon Banik

A Cloud and DevSecOps Engineer and Consultant, passionate about simplification of technology and make it consumable. https://www.linkedin.com/in/riponbanik/