Upgrade a server - Simple Application Server - Alibaba Cloud Documentation Center

As your business grows, your server's resources, such as vCPUs, memory, disk space, or data transfer quota can become insufficient. You can upgrade to a more powerful plan to meet your new requirements.

Limits

You can only upgrade, but cannot downgrade.
You must upgrade the entire plan; you cannot upgrade individual resources like the system disk, memory, or bandwidth separately.
You cannot upgrade across instance families or disk types.
- You cannot upgrade a server between different instance families or from an older generation plan to a current one.
- Old plans do not support cross-disk upgrades. For example, you cannot upgrade from a standard SSD to an ESSD.
If the current plan is already the highest, you cannot upgrade it further.
If you are using an old plan and the current disk type plan is already the highest, you cannot upgrade it further.
Other upgrade methods:
- Standard SSD: You can create a new simple application server from a custom image, and select a PL0 ESSD for the server. For more information, see Create a custom image and Use a custom image to create simple application servers.
- ESSD plan: You can share an image to Elastic Compute Service (ECS), and then use the shared image to create an ECS instance. For more information, see Share an image to ECS and Create an instance by using a custom image.

Impacts of upgrades

Item	Description
System disk	If the upgrade includes a larger system disk, you must manually extend the partitions and file systems inside the OS after the upgrade is complete.
Bandwidth and traffic	Data transfer usage from the current month is carried over and deducted from the new plan's monthly quota. Example For example, before a upgrade, the server has a data transfer quota of 400 GB and transferred 100 GB of data over the Internet in the current month. After the server is upgraded, the new plan provides a data transfer quota of 600 GB. The 100 GB of used data transfer is discounted from the new quota and the balance of the data transfer quota of the server is 500 GB. Specific upgrade plans do not include monthly data transfer quotas and cannot be used to offset the fees incurred by data transfers. However, if you upgrade this plan to a plan that includes a monthly data transfer quota, you may be charged additional fees based on the actual data usage. For more information, see Billable items.
Business	The server needs to be restarted to complete the upgrade. To minimize the impact of the upgrade, perform the upgrade during off-peak hours.
Others	The public and private IP addresses, operating systems, firewalls, snapshots, custom images, and expiration time of the simple application servers remain unchanged after the upgrade.

Billing

When you upgrade a server, you will be charged the price difference between your old and new plans for the remainder of your billing cycle. Please refer to the Upgrade/Downgrade page of the Simple Application Server console.

Example:

For example, you purchase Plan A of USD 3.5 per month for one year at a 15 percent discount. After six months, the current specification cannot meet your requirements. You want to upgrade Plan A to Plan B of USD 4.5 per month, which provides a 12 percent discount for a half-year order. In this case, you must pay for a price difference. The price difference = (Price of Plan B - Price of Plan A) × (100% - Discount of Plan B) × Number of subscription months, or (4.5 - 3.5) × (100% - 12%) × 6 = USD 5.28.

Preparations

We recommend that you create snapshots for the disks of your simple application server to back up data before you upgrade the server. For more information, see the Create a snapshot section of the "Manage snapshots" topic.

Warning

If the upgrade fails, data may be lost. To prevent data loss, create snapshots for the disks to back up data before the upgrade. The snapshot creation requires a period of time. Wait until the snapshots are created.

Procedure

Step 1: Upgrade the plan

Go to the Servers page in the Simple Application Server console.
On the card of a server, choose More > Upgrade.
Note
If the Upgrade button is dimmed, it means the plan includes disks with the highest specifications and cannot be upgraded. For more information, see Q2: Why is the upgrade button dimmed?
In Precautions, read the precautions and click Go to the Upgrade page.
In the Instance Plan section, select a new plan based on your business requirements.
You can view the configuration fee in the lower-right corner of the page.
In the Terms of Service section, read the terms of service and agreement. Ensure you fully understand and acknowledge them.
Click Buy Now. On the Purchase page, check the order and follow instructions to complete the payment.
Go back to the console and wait for the server to restart. If the status of the server changes to Running, the upgraded is successful.

(Conditionally required) Step 2: Extend the partition and file system on the system disk

If you extend the size of the system disk when you upgrade the simple application server, you must extend the partition and file system on the system disk to complete the extension. Otherwise, skip this step.

Extend the partition and file system on the system disk of a Linux server

In this example, the original capacity of the system disk is 40 GB. After the upgrade, the new capacity is 50 GB.

Note

For each server, the default name of the system disk is /dev/vda.

Connect to the updated server.
For more information, see Connect to a Linux server.
View the information about the disks and partitions of the server.
1. View the information of the disks of the server.
```
sudo fdisk -lu
```
  Data disks are not involved in the upgrade. The figure shows only information about the /dev/vda system disk.Description of the information shown in the preceding figure:
  - Section ①: shows the new capacity of the system disk /dev/vda after the upgrade.
  - Section ②: The Device column indicates the partition name of the system disk. The System column indicates the partition format. In this example, Linux indicates that the partition format is Master Boot Record (MBR). By default, the partition name of the system disk of each server is /dev/vda1 in MBR format.
2. View information about the partitions.
```
df -Th
```
  For each simple application server, the default file system type of the system disk partition /dev/vda1 is Ext4. The command output shown in the following figure indicates that the file system size of the system disk partition remains 40 GB that is the same as the file system size before the upgrade. To complete the extension of the system disk, extend the partition and the file system.
Extend the partition.
1. Install the growpart utility.
  Different operating system versions require different commands to run:
  Alibaba Cloud Linux 2/3 or CentOS 7 or later
  sudo yum install -y cloud-utils-growpart
  Debian 9 or later or Ubuntu 14 or later
  Run the following command to update the software repository:
  sudo apt-get update
  Run the following command to install cloud-guest-utils:
  sudo apt-get install -y cloud-guest-utils
2. Extend the partition.
  Note
  Use a space to separate /dev/vda and 1 in the command. A value of 1 indicates the partition number.
```
sudo growpart /dev/vda 1
```
  The following figure shows the sample command output.If error occurs, please manually troubleshoot the issue. For more information, see FAQ.
Extend the file system.
The default file system type of the disk partition /dev/vda1 is Ext4. This section describes how to extend an Ext4 file system.
1. Run one of the following commands to extend the file system based on the file system type:
  - Ext4
```
sudo resize2fs /dev/vda1
```
  - eXtensible File System (XFS)
```
sudo xfs_growfs /dev/vda1
```
2. Check whether the file system is extended.
```
df -Th
```
  If the file system is 50 GB as shown in the figure, the file system is extended.After extending the system disk, please check whether the actual size of the system disk is as your expectation.
  - If the actual size of the system disk is expected and programs on the server run normally, the upgrade is complete.
  - If the disk size is incorrect or your applications are not working, roll back the disk using the snapshot you created. For more information, see Roll back a disk based on a snapshot.

Extend the file system on the system disk of a Windows server

In this example, server runs in Windows Server 2012 R2 64-bit operating system. The original capacity of the system disk (Disk C) is 40 GB. After the upgrade, the new capacity of the system disk (Disk C) is 60 GB.

Connect to the upgraded Windows server.
For more information, see Connect to a Windows server.
In the lower-left corner of the Windows desktop, right-click the icon and click Disk Management.
In Disk Management, you can view the amount of unallocated space on the system disk.
Right-click the blank space in the Disk 0 section and select Extend Volume...
In the Extend Volume Wizard, use the default settings to extend the volume.
The new space is automatically added as shown in the following figure.
After extending the system disk, please check whether the actual size of the system disk is as your expectation.
- If the actual size of the system disk is expected and programs on the server run normally, the upgrade is complete.
- If the actual size of the system disk is not the same as the expected, use the snapshot to roll back the system disk. For more information, see Roll back a disk based on a snapshot.

FAQ

Q1: Can I separately upgrade resources such as the system disk and bandwidth of a simple application server?

A1: No. A simple application server is sold as a plan. You can only upgrade the server to an appropriate plan, but cannot separately upgrade the computing resources (vCPUs and memory), storage resources (system disk capacity), or network resources (traffic quota and Internet bandwidth) of the server. However, you can separately resize the data disk attached to the server. For more information, see Extend a data disk.

Q2: Why is the Upgrade button dimmed?

A2: If the current standard SSDs or ESSDs plan is the highest plan, you cannot upgrade them.

Other upgrade methods:

Standard SSD: You can create a new simple application server from a custom image, and select a PL0 ESSD for the server. For more information, see Create a custom image and Use a custom image to create simple application servers.
ESSD plan: You can share an image to Elastic Compute Service (ECS), and then use the shared image to create an ECS instance. For more information, see Share an image to ECS and Create an instance by using a custom image.

References

If the storage space is insufficient, you can upgrade the plan or manually attach a data disk. For more information, see Attach a data disk.
You can resize a data disk if the space is insufficient. For more information, see Extend a data disk.

Simple Application Server:Upgrade plan configurations