Using Network File System to mount EFS file systems - Amazon Elastic File System
PrerequisitesNFS support

Using Network File System to mount EFS file systems

Following, learn how to install the Network File System (NFS) client and how to mount your Amazon EFS file system on an Amazon EC2 instance. You also can find an explanation of the mount command and the available options for specifying your file system's Domain Name System (DNS) name in the mount command. In addition, you can find how to use the file fstab to automatically remount your file system after any system restarts.

Note

In this section, you can learn how to mount your Amazon EFS file system without the amazon-efs-utils package. To use encryption of data in transit with your file system, you must mount your file system with Transport Layer Security (TLS). To do so, we recommend using the amazon-efs-utils package. For more information, see Installing the Amazon EFS client.

Topics

Prerequisites

Before you can mount a file system, make sure you meet the following requirements:

NFS support

Amazon EFS supports the Network File System versions 4.0 and 4.1 (NFSv4) protocols when mounting your file systems on Amazon EC2 instances. Although NFSv4.0 is supported, we recommend that you use NFSv4.1. Mounting your Amazon EFS file system on your Amazon EC2 instance also requires an NFS client that supports your chosen NFSv4 protocol. Amazon EC2 Mac instances running macOS Big Sur only support NFS v4.0.

Amazon EFS does not support the nconnect mount option.

Note

For Linux kernel versions 5.4.*, the Linux NFS client uses a default read_ahead_kb value of 128 KB. We recommend increasing this value to 15 MB. For more information, see Optimizing the NFS read_ahead_kb size.

For optimal performance and to avoid a variety of known NFS client bugs, we recommend working with a recent Linux kernel. If you are using an enterprise Linux distribution, we recommend the following:

  • Amazon Linux 2

  • Amazon Linux 2017.09 or newer

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux (and derivatives such as CentOS) version 7 and newer

  • Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and newer

  • SLES 12 Sp2 or later

If you are using another distribution or a custom kernel, we recommend kernel version 4.3 or newer. To troubleshoot issues related to certain AMI or kernel versions when using Amazon EFS from an EC2 instance, see Troubleshooting AMI and kernel issues.

Note

Mounting EFS file systems with Amazon EC2 instances running Microsoft Windows is not supported.