Enhanced SSDs (ESSDs) that support the Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) protocol are called NVMe disks. NVMe disks can be simultaneously attached to multiple Elastic Compute Service (ECS) instances that support NVMe for data sharing. This topic describes the limits of NVMe disks and related operations.

Overview

Note Features related to NVMe disks are supported in Hangzhou Zone I, Shanghai Zone B, Beijing Zone K, and Shenzhen Zone F.
NVMe disks support concurrent read and write access from multiple ECS instances and provide high reliability, concurrency, and performance. NVMe disks provide the multi-attach and I/O blocking features. After NVMe disks are attached to Linux instances based on NVMe, you can run the lsblk command to check the device names and partition names of the NVMe disks, as shown in the following figure.Device names and partition names of NVMe disks
Device names and partition names of NVMe disks:
  • The device names of the NVMe disks are displayed in the /dev/nvmeXn1 format. Examples: /dev/nvme0n1, /dev/nvme1n1, and /dev/nvme2n1.
  • The partition names of the NVMe disks are displayed in the <Device name of the ESSD>p<Partition number> format. Examples: /dev/nvme0n1p1, /dev/nvme1n1p1, and /dev/nvme1n1p2.

The multi-attach feature allows you to attach a single NVMe disk to up to 16 ECS instances that support the NVMe protocol at the same time. For information about how to enable the multi-attach feature for NVMe disks, see Enable multi-attach.

Limits

Before you can attach NVMe disks to an ECS instance based on NVMe, make sure that the resources of the instance meet the conditions described in the following table.
Resource Description
Instance family The instance family must support NVMe by default. Currently, the g7se, c7se, and r7se instance families support NVMe.
Note You can call the DescribeInstanceTypes operation to query instance families and check the NvmeSupport response parameter to determine whether the instance family supports NVMe.
Image The image must contain the NVMe driver. The following public images have the NVMe driver installed.
Note Only some public Linux and Windows images support the NVMe driver.
  • Alibaba Cloud Linux 2.1903 and later
  • Ubuntu 16.04 and later
  • Debian GNU/Linux 10 and later
  • CentOS:
    • CentOS 7: CentOS 7.6 and later
    • CentOS 8: CentOS 8.0 and later
  • openSUSE 15.2 and later
  • Fedora 33 and later
  • Fedora CoreOS
  • Windows Server:
    • Windows Server 2019
    • Windows Server 2016
Disk
  • Disk category: ESSD.
  • Creation method:
    • Create ESSDs when you create instances that support NVMe.
    • When you create disks, select ESSD as the disk category and enable the multi-attach feature.

Billing

NVMe is provided free of charge. You are charged for resources that support NVMe based on their individual billing methods. For more information about the billing of ECS resources, see Overview.

Operations

The following table describes the operations that you can perform on NVMe disks.

Operation Description References
Create an ECS instance that supports NVMe When you create an ECS instance that supports NVMe, you can create ESSDs along with the instance. These ESSDs are NVMe disks. Create an instance by using the wizard
Enable the multi-attach feature for an NVMe disk When you separately create an ESSD, you can enable the multi-attach feature and attach the ESSD to multiple ECS instances that support NVMe. Enable multi-attach
Partition and format an NVMe disk NVMe disks created along with instances can be partitioned and formatted.
Notice The operations are applicable only to ESSDs that are created along with instances and not to ESSDs for which the multi-attach feature is enabled.
Resize an NVMe disk If the disk space of an NVMe disk is insufficient, you can resize the disk online to extend it capacity. Resize disks online for Linux instances