Adding more disk space (EBS volumes) to your site on Ubuntu Linux

The ArcGIS for Server AMI comes with an attached EBS volume. The size of this volume is set at 100 GB by default when you build your site with ArcGIS Server Cloud Builder on Amazon Web Services. If you build your site with the AWS Management Console, the size is 10 GB. If you need more space, you can create additional volumes and attach them to your EC2 instance.

The steps below explain how to create a new EBS volume and attach it to your EC2 instance.

Steps:

1. Open the AWS Management Console and make sure the Amazon EC2 tab is selected.
2. From the left menu, click Volumes.
3. Click the Create Volume button.
4. Type a value for Size. Remember that you will be charged by Amazon for the size you choose, and you cannot change this size once you've created the volume.
5. Choose a value for Availability Zone. You need to match the zone of the EC2 instance to which you will attach the volume.
6. If you don't know the zone of the instance to which you want to attach the volume, return to the AWS Management Console, click Instances, click your instance, then examine the Description tab to find the zone.
7. Optionally, choose a snapshot. Snapshots are a way of preformatting a disk with certain datasets. To create a new empty disk, choose No Snapshot.
8. Click Create to create the volume. This can take a while. When the volume is ready, you'll see its status change from Creating to Available in the AWS Management Console.
9. You've successfully created your EBS volume, but it's not attached to your EC2 instance yet. The remaining steps explain how to format the disk and attach it to your instance.
10. Right-click the volume and click Attach Volume.
11. Choose your instance from the drop-down list. Remember that you can only attach your volume to instances that reside in the same availability zone.
12. Use the Device field to specify how to expose the volume to the instance (/dev/sdb through /dev/sdz). Click Attach.

    It may take a few minutes to attach your volume. You can see the status in the Attachment Information column in the AWS Management Console list of volumes. After a while, Attaching changes to Attached.

13. To make a volume available to the Linux operating system, use the following command (the following command is an example of how to create an ext3 file system and mount it as /mnt/data-store):
    ssh –i <your key pair file> ubuntu@<Public DNS of your EC2 instance>
    
    sudo yes | mkfs –t ext3 /dev/sdh
    
    Caution: This procedure assumes you want to mount an empty volume. If you're mounting a volume that already has data on it, don't use mkfs before mounting the volume. Otherwise you'll format the volume and delete the existing data.
     
    sudo mkdir /mnt/data-store
    sudo mount /dev/sdh /mnt/data-store
    

Any data written to this file system is written to the Amazon EBS volume and is transparent to applications using the device.

Note:

To enable the instance to reconnect to an Amazon EBS volume on reboot, add the device to the fstab or create a script that automatically mounts the volume on startup.