Software, Hardware, and Other Requirements for Protecting Amazon EC2 Resources

The Commvault software uses access nodes to protect Amazon EC2 resources. Verify that the machines you intend to use as access nodes for Amazon EC2 meet the requirements.

Deployment and Scaling

• A single access node can service multiple AWS Regions and Availability Zones.

• You can scale access nodes vertically or horizontally to achieve additional throughput based on data volume.

• Amazon EC2 access nodes can be deployed either in the same Region, Availability Zone, or AWS account as the protected data or in an alternate Region, Availability Zone, or AWS account as the protected data.

• Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) direct API restores provide optimal restore performance across Regions, Availability Zones, and accounts.

• In a deployment that uses resources from a service account, the access node can be in the service account. For more information, see Using Resources from an AWS Service Account.

• For the following operations, the access node can be an Amazon EC2 instance or an external machine:

  • VM conversion and restores

  • IntelliSnap backups and restores from IntelliSnap jobs

Amazon EC2 Instance Families

The following Amazon EC2 instance families are supported as access nodes:

• Amazon EC2 general purpose (M7a, M7i, M7i-flex, M6g, T4g)

• Amazon EC2 compute optimized (C7a, C7i, C7i-flex, C6g, C7g)

• Amazon EC2 memory optimized (R7a, R7i, R8g, R6g)

The supported instance types have dedicated EBS volume limits, based on instance size. These limits constrain the number of volumes that the Commvault software can include in a single data protection operation. For the largest size, 48xlarge and larger, the limit is 128 volumes. For more information, see Amazon EBS volume limits for Amazon EC2 instances in the AWS documentation.

Operating Systems

Linux

You can configure an access node on a Linux instance using one of the following methods:

• Deploy an AWS instance as an access node from the AWS Marketplace.

  From the AWS Marketplace, you can deploy the Commvault Cloud Access Node BYOL to serve as a Linux access node and as the preferred access node for restores of Linux guest files. This AMI contains all the components that are required to support Linux operations in the Commvault environment.

  For information, see the following:

  • Deploying a Commvault Access Node from AWS Marketplace.

  • The "Specify a Preferred Access Node for Linux Guest File Restores" section on the Modifying Settings for an Amazon EC2 Hypervisor page.

• Use one of the following Linux distributions:

  • Amazon Linux 2023 AMI 64-bit (Arm) (recommended)

  • Amazon Linux 2023 64-bit (x86)

  • Amazon Linux 2 AMI (HVM) - Kernel 5.10, SSD Volume Type 64-bit (x86)

    Important

    For Amazon Linux instances, you must install the dmidecode command-line utility, which enables the Commvault software to detect the instances as access nodes.

    AWS Marketplace AMIs already include dmidecode.

  • RHEL 8.5, 8.3, 8.2, 8.1, 8.0, 7.9, 7.8, 7.7, 7.6, 7.5, 7.4 64-bit (x86)

    Note

    For RHEL 8 instances, to install operating system packages that must enable automatic installation of Mono, register the instances with Red Hat.

• Using a Linux access node to perform any restore, conversion, or replication operation with the AWS VM Import/Export transport mode is not supported.

• For cross-hypervisor restores or replication from VMware to Amazon EC2, you can use a Windows or Linux access node. If you use a Linux access node, for both Windows and Linux guest VMs, the drivers must be installed on the source before performing the backup. Otherwise, the replication operation fails.

Windows

All editions of the following versions of Windows Server, with all Windows-compatible processors, are supported as access nodes for Amazon EC2:

• Windows Server 2019

• Windows Server 2016

Windows Server machines that host an access node must have the most recent paravirtual (PV) driver installed.

Volumes That Host Access Nodes

Volumes that host an access node must be EBS-optimized, high IOPS volumes.

Hardware

Processor Architectures

The following processor architectures are supported:

• x64 (Linux, Windows)

• ARM

Hard Drive

A minimum of 100 GB disk space recommended.

Memory (RAM)

Minimum of 4 GB RAM required beyond the requirements of the operating system and running applications.

Network Connectivity

• Access nodes must have Layer 3 network connectivity to the upstream MediaAgent on port 8403. If the MediaAgent and the access node are in different accounts or in different Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs), you can configure Amazon VPC peering. For information, see VPC peering basics in the AWS documentation.

• Access node machines must be able to connect to ec2.amazonaws.com, or the Regional equivalent if the AWS account is restricted to specific Regions. To route communications through an HTTP or HTTPS proxy, provide proxy information in the CommServe Control Panel, on the HTTP Proxy tab of the Internet Options dialog box. To use an HTTPS proxy, you must provide authentication details.

AWS Service Endpoint Connectivity

To perform data protection operations, Amazon EC2 access nodes must have connectivity to regional and global AWS service endpoints.

For information, see Requirements for Connectivity to AWS Service Endpoints.