How to change the instance type in amazon ec2

Question

Currently I am having m3.xlarge instance type, but I want to change it to t1.micro. I have stopped the server and trying to change the instace type by right click on the instance name .

But when I click on submit to change the server name, I am getting an error in console :

POST https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/modify-instance-attribute 400 (Bad Request) 

When I elaborate it into the network then The response that I got from the server was :

{"errors":[{"service":"AmazonEC2","action":"ModifyInstanceAttribute","endPoint":"https://ec2.us-east-1.amazonaws.com","statusCode":400,"message":"Non-Windows instances with a virtualization type of 'hvm' are currently not supported for this instance type.","errorCode":"InvalidParameterCombination","errorType":"Unknown","requestId":"28025a27-4c3c-452c-8f04-fc4adc8eb335","serviceResponse":{"Response":{"Errors":{"Error":{"Code":"InvalidParameterCombination","Message":"Non-Windows instances with a virtualization type of 'hvm' are currently not supported for this instance type."}},"RequestID":"28025a27-4c3c-452c-8f04-fc4adc8eb335"}}}],"error":"Non-Windows instances with a virtualization type of 'hvm' are currently not supported for this instance type."}

How can I resolve this problem, or how can I change the instance from xlarge to micro

Answer 1

For whatever reason, Amazon's HVM based AMI is not compatible with the t1.micro size.

Amazon has hardware virtual machine (HVM) based AMIs, and paravirtual machine (PVM) based AMIs. From that error message, AWS is saying that your current instance is HVM based, and t1.micro size will only support PVM based instances.

The way round this would be to create a new AMI from your instance and launch a new instance from that AMI as t1.micro size. Be careful, though, this may just create an HVM-based AMI, in which case you will need to snapshot the volume for your current instance and create a new AMI from that.

Some more information on HVM: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/using_cluster_computing.html#concepts_cluster_compute_hvmAMI http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/faqs/#Does_use_of_Cluster_Compute_Instances_differ_from_other_Amazon_EC2_instance_types