Amazon Elastic Block Retailer (Amazon EBS) io2 and io2 Block Specific volumes now assist storage fencing utilizing NVMe reservations. As I discovered whereas penning this submit, storage fencing is used to manage entry to storage for a compute or database cluster, guaranteeing that only one host within the cluster has permission to write down to the quantity at any given time. For instance, you may arrange SQL Server Failover Cluster Situations (FCI) and get greater utility availability inside a single Availability Zone with out the necessity for database replication.

As a fast refresher, io2 Block Specific volumes are designed to fulfill the wants of probably the most demanding I/O-intensive functions working on Nitro-based Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) cases. Volumes might be as massive as 64 TiB, and ship SAN-like efficiency with as much as 256,000 IOPS/quantity and 4,000 MB/second of throughput, all with 99.999% sturdiness and sub-millisecond latency. The volumes assist different superior EBS options together with encryption and Multi-Connect, and might be reprovisioned on-line with out downtime. To study extra, you may learn Amazon EBS io2 Block Specific Volumes with Amazon EC2 R5b Situations Are Now Usually Out there.

Utilizing Reservations
To utilize reservations, you merely create an io2 quantity with Multi-Connect enabled, after which connect it to a number of Nitro-based EC2 cases (see Provisioned IOPS Volumes for a full listing of supported occasion varieties):

If in case you have current io2 Block Specific volumes, you may allow reservations by detaching the volumes from the entire EC2 cases, after which reattaching them. Reservations can be enabled as quickly as you make the primary attachment. If you’re working Home windows Server utilizing AMIs data-stamped 2023.08 or earlier you will have to put in the aws_multi_attach driver as described in AWS NVMe Drivers for Home windows Situations.

Issues to Know
Listed below are a few issues to remember concerning NVMe reservations:

Working System Assist – You need to use NVMe reservations with Home windows Server (2012 R2 and above, 2016, 2019, and 2022), SUSE SLES 12 SP3 and above, RHEL 8.3 and above, and Amazon Linux 2 & later (learn NVMe reservations to study extra).

Cluster and Quantity Managers – Home windows Server Failover Clustering is supported; we’re at present working to qualify different cluster and quantity managers.

Fees – There are not any further costs for this function. Every reservation counts as an I/O operation.

— Jeff;