How do I perform an in-place upgrade on my Amazon EC2 Windows instance?

Short description

To perform an in-place OS upgrade on an EC2 instance, perform a manual in-place upgrade. Or, use AWS Systems Manager to perform an automated in-place upgrade.

Resolution

Prerequisites:

• Create an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) of your instance or take a snapshot of the instance's Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volumes. It's a best practice to keep backups of your instances and data in case you need to restore your instance.
• Validate with your application vendor that the OS upgrade is compatible with your application.

Manual in-place upgrade

Complete the following steps:

1. Make sure that your configuration adheres to the in-place upgrade requirements.

2. (Optional) To verify the driver that your Windows instance uses, choose the Start menu, and then choose Control Panel. Then, choose Network Connections and check the value for Local Area Connection.
   -or-
   Run the following command to identify the driver type:

   pnputil -e

   -or-
   Run the following PowerShell command to check the driver versions that are currently installed:

   Get-WmiObject Win32_PnPSignedDriver| Where { $_.DeviceName -like "*AWS*" -or $_.DeviceName -like "*Amazon*" }| select DeviceName, DriverVersion

3. Make sure that your instance runs the latest version of its Paravirtual (PV), Elastic Network Adapter (ENA), or AWS non-volatile memory express (NVMe) driver.

4. Perform the in-place upgrade.

5. Perform the required post upgrade tasks.

Note: Instance status check 1 of 2 fails until the upgrade process completes. If you experience upgrade issues, or the instance still fails status checks after several hours, then see Troubleshoot an operating system upgrade on an EC2 Windows instance.

For more information, see How to manually upgrade Microsoft Windows Server 2012 on AWS.

Automated in-place upgrade

Note: The automated in-place creates an AMI of the instance, and then launches a temporary instance from the AMI. After the upgrade, the automation creates a new AMI from the temporary instance, and then terminates the temporary instance. To test application functionality, you can launch a test instance from the upgraded AMI. For more information, see Use Automation runbooks to upgrade an EC2 Windows instance.

Use the AWSEC2-CloneInstanceAndUpgradeWindows runbook to automatically upgrade your instance in place.

For more information, see How to automate your Microsoft Windows Server upgrades using AWS Systems Manager.

Related information

Upgrade an EC2 Windows instance to a newer version of Windows Server

How do I upgrade my Amazon EC2 Windows Server instance to a later version?

Upgrade and migrate roles and features in Windows Server on the Microsoft website