Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) is a host controller interface protocol used to accelerate the transfer of data from non-volatile memory. Alibaba Cloud enhanced SSDs (ESSDs) support NVMe. Each ESSD can be simultaneously attached to multiple Elastic Compute Service (ECS) instances that support NVMe for data sharing. This topic describes ESSDs that support NVMe and the limits for and operations of attaching the ESSDs.
ESSDs and NVMe
- A shared NVMe disk can be attached to a maximum of 16 ECS instances at the same time.
- You can run NVMe commands to control the permissions of ECS instances on shared NVMe disks. For more information about NVMe commands, see NVM Express Base Specification.

- The device names of the shared NVMe disks are displayed in the
/dev/nvmeXn1
format. Examples: /dev/nvme0n1, /dev/nvme1n1, and /dev/nvme2n1. - The partition names of the shared NVMe disks are displayed in the
<Device name of the ESSD>p<Partition number>
format. Examples: /dev/nvme0n1p1, /dev/nvme1n1p1, and /dev/nvme1n1p2.
Shared NVMe disks support the multi-attach feature and help enterprises to migrate their high-availability services to the cloud. For more information, see Enable multi-attach.
Limits
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 families support NVMe.
|
Image | The image must contain the NVMe driver. The following public images are installed
with the NVMe driver.
Note Only some public Linux and Windows images support the NVMe driver.
|
Disk |
|
Billing
NVMe is free of charge. You are charged for resources that support NVMe by using their individual billing methods. For more information about the billing of ECS resources, see Overview.
Operations
This section describes the operations that you can perform on shared NVMe disks.
- When you create an ECS instance that supports NVMe, you can create ESSDs. These ESSDs are shared NVMe disks. For more information, see Create an instance by using the wizard.
- You can enable the multi-attach feature when you separately create ESSDs. For more information, see Enable multi-attach.
- Format ESSDs and create file systems. The operations vary based on the partition formats
of ESSDs.
Notice The following operations are applicable only to ESSDs that are created along with instances but not to ESSDs for which the multi-attach feature is enabled.
- Partition ESSDs that are larger than 2 TiB in size to GUID Partition Table (GPT). For more information, see Partition and format a data disk larger than 2 TiB in size.
- Partition ESSDs that are smaller than or equal to 2 TiB in size to Master Boot Record (MBR). For more information, see Partition and format a data disk on a Linux instance or Partition and format a data disk on a Windows instance.