X1 Instances

X1 instances are EBS-optimized by default, providing dedicated storage bandwidth of up to 10 Gbps with Amazon EBS volumes. EBS-optimized instances enable consistently high performance by eliminating contention between storage I/O and other network traffic from your X1 instance. For more information, see Amazon EBS–Optimized Instances.

X1 instances support SSD-based instance storage. Like all instance storage, these volumes persist only for the life of the instance. For more information about instance store volumes, see Amazon EC2 Instance Store.

You can cluster X1 instances in a placement group. Placement groups provide low latency and high-bandwidth connectivity between the instances within a single Availability Zone. For more information, see Placement Groups.

The x1.32xlarge instance type provides the ability to control processor C-states and P-states on Linux. C-states control the sleep levels that a core can enter when it is inactive, while P-states control the desired performance (measured by CPU frequency) from a core. For more information, see Processor State Control for Your EC2 Instance.

X1 instances are available as On-Demand Instances, Reserved Instances, or Scheduled Reserved Instances, but they are not available as Spot Instances or Dedicated Instances. They are also supported on Dedicated Hosts. For more information, see Instance Purchasing Options.

There is a limit on the total number of instances that you can launch in a region, and there are additional limits on some instance types. By default, you can run up to two X1 instances simultaneously. If you need more X1 instances, you can request them using the Amazon EC2 Instance Request Form.

The x1.32xlarge instance type offers 128 vCPUs, which might cause launch issues in some Linux operating systems that have a vCPU limit lower than 128. For more information, see Support for 128 vCPUs.

The instance store for x1.32xlarge is capable of providing up to 126,000 random-read IOPS with a 4 KiB block size. To ensure the best disk I/O performance from your X1 instances on Linux, we recommend that you use the most recent version of the Amazon Linux AMI, or another Linux AMI with a kernel version of 3.8 or later. X1 instances provide the best disk performance when you use a Linux kernel that supports persistent grants, an extension to the Xen block ring protocol that significantly improves disk throughput and scalability. For more information about persistent grants, see the Improving block protocol scalability with persistent grants post on the Xen Project Blog.

X1 instances have high-memory (up to 1,952 GiB of RAM) and require 64-bit HVM AMIs to take advantage of that capacity. HVM AMIs provide superior performance in comparison to paravirtual (PV) AMIs on high-memory instance types. For more information, see Linux AMI Virtualization Types.

You must launch your X1 instances into a virtual private cloud (VPC); the EC2-Classic platform is not supported. EC2-VPC enables you to launch AWS resources into a virtual network that you've defined. You cannot change the instance type of an existing instance in EC2-Classic to an X1 instance type. For more information about EC2-Classicand EC2-VPC , see Supported Platforms . For more information about launching a VPC-only instance, see Instance Types Available Only in a VPC .

Amazon Linux AMI 2016.03 (HVM)

Ubuntu Server 14.04 LTS (HVM)

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.1 (HVM)

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 (HVM)