Amazon Elastic Block Retailer (Amazon EBS) io2 and io2 Block Categorical volumes now assist storage fencing utilizing NVMe reservations. As I discovered whereas scripting this submit, storage fencing is used to control entry to storage for a compute or database cluster, making certain that only one host within the cluster has permission to put in writing to the quantity at any given time. For instance, you possibly can arrange SQL Server Failover Cluster Cases (FCI) and get larger utility availability inside a single Availability Zone with out the necessity for database replication.

As a fast refresher, io2 Block Categorical volumes are designed to satisfy the wants of probably the most demanding I/O-intensive functions operating 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 possibly can learn Amazon EBS io2 Block Categorical Volumes with Amazon EC2 R5b Cases Are Now Usually Obtainable.

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 record of supported occasion sorts):

You probably have present io2 Block Categorical volumes, you possibly can allow reservations by detaching the volumes from all the EC2 cases, after which reattaching them. Reservations will probably be enabled as quickly as you make the primary attachment. In case you are operating Home windows Server utilizing AMIs data-stamped 2023.08 or earlier you will want to put in the aws_multi_attach driver as described in AWS NVMe Drivers for Home windows Cases.

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

Working System Assist – You need to use NVMe reservations with Home windows Server (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.

Expenses – There are not any extra fees for this characteristic. Every reservation counts as an I/O operation.

— Jeff;