Moving from EC2 instance to EBS?

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#1 Sun, 04/12/2009 - 07:54
Taler

Moving from EC2 instance to EBS?

Hello, I'm a total newbie at both AWS and Virtualmin, so forgive me if I say something inane.

My question is, since Instances aren't meant to be permanent, should I move Virtualmin installed in the instance to EBS lest I lose everything when the instance shuts down?

Is this what I'm supposed to do? If so how? Or am I totally missing the mark? Thanks.

Sun, 04/12/2009 - 20:30
Joe
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There are two "partitions" in an AMI. One is persistent. When you shutdown and come back up, it will remain. It is 10GB (I think). Then there is the ephemeral storage, which is 160GB, and will not be there for you on subsequent boots. The ephemeral storage must be backed up somehow before shutting down and restored when coming back up. Virtualmin can backup to S3, so that's one option.

EBS, I think, is also supported in some sort of way (Jamie is aware of it, anyway, so maybe he's still working on supporting it, I'm not sure), but I haven't actually used EC2 since EBS came into existence so I don't actually know what it does or how it works. So, you probably know as much as I do about it. I'll hopefully have more time to spend with it soon.

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Sun, 05/10/2009 - 04:01 (Reply to #2)
cdeszaq

EBS functions like a block device, so you have to put a file system on top of it to do much. The up-sides are much better performance, cheaper per GB storage, and an easy way to have persistent, easily usable storage for an instance.

On the down side, each EBS can only be attached to 1 instance at a time, however since traffic within an availability zone is free, you could set up a "file server" that has a bunch of EBSs attached to it.

Since EBS works like an other block device, I would imagine that Virtualmin can use it with no difficulty.

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