How to Upgrade the PV drivers for EC2

Amazon EC2 Windows AMIs have drivers that allow access to virtualized hardware.

These drivers are used by Amazon EC2 to map instance store, Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volumes, and network interfaces.

For improving the stability and performance of  EC2 Windows instances we can install the latest drivers.

Important things to know before updating:

1. When we stop an instance, the data on any instance store volumes is erased. Therefore, if there is any data on instance store volumes that we wish to keep, we must keep backup in persistent storage.

2. Assigning an Elastic IP address for the instance. The public IP address for the instance is released when it’s stopped or terminated. And a stopped instance receives a new public IP address once it is restarted.

Steps to upgrade to the latest PV driver:

1. Firstly, go to the Amazon EC2 console, and click on Instances.

2. Then we must choose the instance that requires the driver upgrade.

3. And go to Instance State, and click on Stop.

4. Once the instance is stopped, we can create a backup. For this, we must go to Image, and click Create Image.

5. After that again go to Instance State and click on Start.

6. Next we have to connect to the instance using Remote Desktop Connection (RDP).

7. For the latest PV drivers, we must go to Upgrade Windows Server Instances (AWS PV Upgrade), select Download.

8. Finally, we can extract the contents of the folder and then run AWSPVDriverSetup.msi.

We will now have the latest PV drivers installed on our EC2 Windows instance.