AWS: Upgrade PV Drivers on Windows Instances

Amazon Windows AMIs contain a set of drivers to permit access to Xen virtualized hardware. These drivers are used by Amazon EC2 to map instance store and Amazon EBS volumes to their devices.
If your Windows instance is launched from a Windows Server 2012 R2 AMI, it uses AWS PV drivers. If your Windows instance uses RedHat drivers, you can upgrade to Citrix drivers. If you are already using Citrix drivers, you can upgrade the Citrix Xen guest agent service. To verify which driver your Windows instance uses, open Network Connections in Control Panel and view the Local Area Connection. Check whether the driver is one of the following:
  • AWS PV Network Device
  • Citrix PV Ethernet Adapter
  • RedHat PV NIC Driver
Alternatively, you can check the output from the pnputil -e command.
AWS PV Drivers
Windows Server 2012 R2 AMIs include AWS PV drivers. The AWS PV drivers are stored in the %ProgramFiles%\Amazon\Xentools directory. This directory also contains public symbols and a command line tool, xenstore-client.exe, that enables you to access entries in XenStore. For example, the following PowerShell command returns the current time from the Hypervisor:
The AWS PV driver components are listed in the Windows registry under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services. These driver components are as follows: XENBUS, xeniface, xennet, xenvbd, and xenvif.
AWS PV also has a driver component named LiteAgent, which runs as a Windows service. It handles tasks such as shutdown and restart events from the API. You can access and manage services by running Services.msc from the command line.
Citrix PV Drivers
The Citrix drivers are stored in the %ProgramFiles%\Citrix\XenTools (32-bit instances) or %ProgramFiles(x86)%\Citrix\XenTools (64-bit instances) directory.
The Citrix driver components are listed in the Windows registry under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services. These driver components are as follows: xenevtchn, xeniface, xennet, Xennet6, xensvc, xenvbd, and xenvif.
Citrix also has a driver component named XenGuestAgent, which runs as a Windows service. It handles tasks such as time synchronization at boot (Windows Server 2003 only), and shutdown and restart events from the API. You can access and manage services by running Services.msc from the command line.
If you are encountering networking errors while performing certain workloads, you may need to disable the TCP offloading feature for the Citrix PV driver. For more information, see TCP Offloading.
RedHat PV Drivers
The source files for the RedHat drivers are in the %ProgramFiles%\RedHat (32-bit instances) or %ProgramFiles(x86)%\RedHat (64-bit instances) directory. The two drivers are rhelnet, the RedHat Paravirtualized network driver, and rhelscsi, the RedHat SCSI miniport driver.
Upgrading PV Drivers on Your Windows AMI.
  • Connect to your instance and log in as the Administrator account with the password.
  • In your instance, download the Citrix upgrade package by going to 
  • http://aws.amazon.com/developertools/2187524384750206
  • Extract the contents of the upgrade package to a location of your choice.
  • Go the folder Citrix-WIN_PV where you have extracted the zip file.
  • Double-click the Upgrade.bat file. If you get a security warning, click Run.
  • In the Upgrade Drivers dialog box, review the information and click Yes if you are ready to start the upgrade.
  • In the Red Hat Paravirtualized Xen Drivers for Windows Uninstaller dialog box, click Yes to remove the RedHat software. Your instance will be rebooted.

Note:If you do not see the Uninstaller dialog box, click Red Hat Paravirtualiz… in the Windows taskbar.

  • The upgrade operations should have restarted the server 3 or 4 times. You can see in the log file by the number of times Windows is Ready to use is displayed.
  • Connect to your instance and log in as the local administrator.
  • Close the Red Hat Paravirtualized Xen Drivers for Windows Uninstaller dialog box.
  • Confirm that the installation is complete. Navigate to the Citrix-WIN_PV folder that you extracted earlier, open the PVUpgrade.log file, and then check for the text INSTALLATION IS COMPLETE.


Keywords: AWS, PV Drivers Update, Windows Activiation 

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