How do you share drives between Amazon AWS instances?

Question

I have two Amazon AWS instances running Windows 2012 and both have attached EBS drives.  I would like one of the instances, lets say INST01 to share it's D drive with INST02.  INST02 has ArcGIS Server running on it and I would like it to access data on the D drive on INST01.  I thought all I would have to do is share the D drive on INST01 with the share name "D", then on INST02 just map a network drive to \server\share like \INST01\D, but that does not work.  I then thought I would need to use the internal IP, or what Amazon calls "private IP", for INST01, like \172.31.44.60\D, but that did not work.  I even tried using the public IP assinged to INST01, but that did not work.  Finally I tried using the instance ID, like \i-c3bb29d7\D, but again that did not work.

I must be missing something in the setup that Amazon is not allowing this simple task to work on my servers.  Anyone have a VERY CLEAR step by step example on how to set this up?  It would be greatly appreciated!

MichaelCarson4 · Answer

It is working now.  You must have a security group setup that is shared by both instances and configure the security group to allow port 445.  In the EC2 Dashboard in the Security Groups section, I edited the Inbound tab of the security group and added a "Custom TCP Rule", set to port 445, and limited it to the private IP address ranges of my instances.  I logged in to the first instance and setup the drive share to be "D" for all users read only.  Then I logged into the second instance and mapped a network drive using \private_IP\D to the first instance.  When you map to the drive, it will ask for your login and password on that instance and then you can view the contents of the drive.