How can I configure a gp2 boot volume for my Windows EC2 instances?

Question

I want to use the new "gp2" volume type as the boot volume for my Windows instances, with an out-of-the-box Windows AMI from Amazon (e.g. ami-527b823a), and the AWS SDK for .NET (v2.1.7 - latest as of 9-July-2014). How do I configure my run-instances request?

Based on the post on the AWS blog, I tried setting a BlockDeviceMapping:

new RunInstancesRequest {
    ...
    BlockDeviceMappings = {
        BlockDeviceMapping {
            DeviceName = "sda1",
            Ebs = new EbsBlockDevice { VolumeType = VolumeType.Gp2 }
        },
        new BlockDeviceMapping {
            DeviceName = "xvdf",
            Ebs = new EbsBlockDevice {
                SnapshotId = SNAPSHOT_ID
                DeleteOnTermination = true,
                VolumeType = VolumeType.Gp2
            }
        }
        ...
    }
}

But this didn't work, and I got an unsurprising exception:

Amazon.EC2.AmazonEC2Exception: The device 'sda1' is used in more than one
block-device mapping ---> System.Net.WebException: The remote server
returned an error: (400) Bad Request.
   at System.Net.HttpWebRequest.GetResponse()
   ...

Is it possible to set the boot (root) volume of my windows instances to gp2? Or do I need to wait for a later release of the SDK?

Answer 1

Using the following code and version 2.1.7 of the AWS SDK for .NET, I was able to successfully launch with a GP2 EBS root volume:

BlockDeviceMapping mapping = new BlockDeviceMapping
{
    DeviceName = "/dev/sda1",
    Ebs = new EbsBlockDevice
    {
        VolumeType = VolumeType.Gp2,
        VolumeSize = 30
    }
};
var request = new RunInstancesRequest
{
    BlockDeviceMappings = { mapping },
    ImageId = "ami-527b823a",
    InstanceType = InstanceType.M1Small,
    MinCount = 1,
    MaxCount =1
};
var ec2Client = new AmazonEC2Client(RegionEndpoint.USEast1);
ec2Client.RunInstances(request);