What do I need to do before migrating my EC2 instance to a sixth generation instance to make sure that I get maximum network performance?

Short description

Sixth generation instances (except C6g, M6g, and R6g instances) might require an updated driver for the Elastic Network Adapter (ENA). Running earlier ENA drivers with sixth generation instances might lead to suboptimal performance or elastic network interface attachment failure. Before migrating to sixth generation instances, make sure that your AMI includes compatible drivers. Or, if you plan to launch the instance with a new AMI, make sure that you select the correct AMI version with embedded compatible drivers.

Resolution

Linux-based operating systems

To make sure that the appropriate driver is installed before migration, do the following:

1.    If you're using Amazon Linux 2, then run the following command to verify the ENA driver version. Also, run this command if you ever updated the ENA driver from the Amazon ENA GitHub repository for any OS.

modinfo ena

2.    Use the command results and the following table to verify that your ENA driver is updated. If the results show an earlier version than the value in the Version column of the table, then update the driver.

Environment	Version
Linux ENA GitHub	ENA driver version v2.2.9
Linux upstream	Kernel version 5.9
Amazon Linux 2	Kernel 4.14.186
Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)	RHEL 8.3 kernel 4.18.0-240.1.1.el8_3.ARCH
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES)	SLE 12 SP4 kernel 4.12.14-95.99.3, SLE 12 SP5 kernel 4.12.14-122.116.1, SLE 15 kernel 4.12.14-150000.150.92.2, SLE 15 SP1 kernel 4.12.14-150100.197.114.2, SLE 15 SP2 kernel 5.3.18-24.15.1 and all later SLE version kernels
Linux Ubuntu	20.04 kernel 5.4.0-1025-aws
DPDK	v20.11
FreeBSD	v2.3.1

Note: The following earlier ENA driver versions result in elastic network interface attachment failure with sixth generation instances.

• ENA Linux: Earlier than v1.2.0
• ENA DPDK: Earlier than v1.1.1
• ENA VMware ESXi: Earlier than 1.6.0
• ENA FreeBSD: Earlier than v2.3.1

Windows-based operating systems

Note: Only Windows Server 2008 R2 or later is compatible with sixth generation instances.

To make sure that the appropriate driver is installed before migration, do the following:

1.    Open PowerShell in the EC2 Windows instance that you want to migrate to sixth generation. Then, run the following command:

Get-WmiObject Win32_PnPSignedDriver| select devicename, driverversion | where {$_.devicename -like "*Amazon Elastic Network*"}

The following is an example of the command output:

devicename   driverversion
----------        -------------
Amazon Elastic Network Adapter 2.1.4.0

2.    If the preceding command's output indicates that the driver version is earlier than v2.0.0, then update the driver. Driver versions earlier than v2.0.0 result in elastic network interface attachment failure with sixth generation instances.

If the command has no output, then a driver isn't present. For information on installing a driver, see Turn on enhanced networking on Windows.

Related information

Turn on enhanced networking with the Elastic Network Adapter (ENA) on Windows instances