You can resize Alibaba Cloud disks online without having to restart their ECS instances. If the ECS instances that you want to resize were created before March 30, 2019, follow the procedure described in this topic to check whether the Red Hat VirtIO SCSI driver of these instances needs to be updated.

Background information

  • The Red Hat VirtIO SCSI driver is only supported on Windows Server 2008 and later versions.
  • If an ECS instance has multiple data disks attached, the driver update process may take a few minutes to complete.

Procedure

The procedure to update the Red Hat VirtIO SCSI driver of Windows ECS instances is as follows:
  1. Step 1: Check the driver version
  2. Step 2: Download the driver
  3. Step 3: Update the Red Hat VirtIO SCSI driver

Step 1: Check the driver version

You can check the driver version using one of the following methods:
  • Method 1: Use the PowerShell script to check the driver version
    1. Connect to the Windows ECS instance. For more information, see Connect to a Windows instance.
    2. Open Command Prompt.
    3. Enter powershell to access the PowerShell interactive interface.
    4. Enter and run the following command to check the driver version and determine based on the command output whether the ECS instance supports online disk resizing: 
      [System.Diagnostics.FileVersionInfo]::GetVersionInfo("C:\Windows\System32\drivers\viostor.sys")
      Check the driver version
      • If the version of the Red Hat VirtIO SCSI driver of the Windows ECS instance is 58011 or later, the disks attached to the instance support online resizing. For information about how to resize disks online, see Resize cloud disks online.
      • If the version of the Red Hat VirtIO SCSI driver is earlier than 58011, proceed to the next step.
  • Method 2: Manually check the driver version
    1. Connect to the Windows ECS instance.
    2. Go to the system directory C:\Windows\System32\drivers.
    3. Right-click the viostor.sys file, choose Properties from the shortcut menu, and view the file version on the Details tab.File version
      • If the version of the Red Hat VirtIO SCSI driver of the Windows ECS instance is 58011 or later, the disks attached to the instance support online resizing. For information about how to resize disks online, see Resize cloud disks online.
      • If the version of the Red Hat VirtIO SCSI driver is earlier than 58011, proceed to the next step.

Step 2: Download the driver

Download and decompress the VirtIO driver package. The subsequent steps in this topic are based on the assumption that the decompressed driver package is located at C:\Users\Administrator\Desktop\virtioDriver. The following table lists the extracted folders corresponding to ECS instances of different operating system versions.

Driver file (folder) name Description
win7 Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7
Wlh Windows Server 2008
Win8 Windows Server 2012 and Windows Server 2012 R2
win10 Windows 10, Windows Server 2016, and Windows Server systems of later versions
amd64 64-bit
x86 32-bit

Step 3: Update the Red Hat VirtIO SCSI driver

You can update the Red Hat VirtIO SCSI driver using one of the following methods:
  • Method 1: Use pnputil to add and install the driver
    1. Open Command Prompt.
    2. Run the following command to add the driver package: 
      pnputil -i -a <path to virtio driver inf>
      Note Make sure that you have extracted the .inf target file to the specified directory (<path to virtio driver inf>, for example, C:\Users\Administrator\Desktop\virtioDriver\Wlh\amd64\*.inf).
      Add the driver package
    3. Restart the operating system of the ECS instance for the driver update to take effect.
  • Method 2: Manually add the driver
    1. Open Device Manager.
    2. Right-click Red Hat VirtIO SCSI controller under Storage controllers and choose Update Driver Software... from the shortcut menu.
      Note If multiple Red Hat VirtIO SCSI controller devices appear, you only need to update one of them.
    3. Select Browse my computer for driver software.
    4. Select Let me pick from a list of device drivers on my computer.
    5. Click Have Disk.
    6. Select the driver file viostor in the corresponding folder, and follow the wizard to update the driver.
    7. Restart the operating system of the ECS instance for the driver update to take effect.

What to do next

Resize cloud disks online