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Amazon EBS Direct Transport Mode for Backups, Restores, Replications, and Conversions to Amazon EC2

The Amazon EBS Direct transport mode for backups, restores, replications, and conversions to Amazon EC2 provides the best performance and cost optimization and handles operations across regions, Availability Zones (AZ), and AWS accounts.

Performance

For Amazon EBS volumes that were created from Amazon EBS snapshots, the storage blocks must be pulled from Amazon S3 and written to the Amazon EBS volume before you can access them.

This preliminary action takes time and can cause a significant increase in the latency of I/O operations the first time each block is accessed.

Amazon EBS volume-level performance is achieved after all blocks are downloaded and written to the Amazon EBS volume.

Supported VMware Guest Operating Systems (for Converting VMware VMs to Amazon EC2 Instances)

Windows

  • Microsoft Windows Server 2019 (Standard, Datacenter) (64-bit only)

  • Microsoft Windows Server 2016 (Standard, Datacenter) (64-bit only)

  • Microsoft Windows Server 2012 (Standard, Datacenter) (64-bit only)

  • Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2 (Standard, Datacenter) (64-bit only) (Nano Server installation not supported)

  • Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 (Standard, Web Server, Datacenter, Enterprise) (64-bit only)

    Note

    For Windows Server 2008 R2 and later, validation might fail for the converted instance in AWS. To resolve this issue, set the RealTimeIsUniversal registry key on the source VM as described in the AWS article Configure time settings for Windows Server 2008 and later, and then perform a new backup to use as the source for the conversion or replication.

  • Microsoft Windows Server 1803 (Standard, Datacenter) (64-bit only)

  • Microsoft Windows Server 1709 (Standard, Datacenter) (64-bit only)

  • Microsoft Windows 10 (Home, Professional, Enterprise, Education) (US English) (64-bit only)

Linux

  • Oracle Linux 8.x

  • Oracle Linux 7.x

  • Oracle Linux 6.x

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8.x

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7.x

  • SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 and more recent releases

  • Ubuntu 22.x

  • Ubuntu 21.10

  • Ubuntu 20.04

  • Ubuntu 18.04

  • Ubuntu 17.04

  • Ubuntu 16.10

  • Ubuntu 16.04

  • Ubuntu 15.04

  • Ubuntu 14.10

  • Ubuntu 14.04

Supported EBS Volume Partitioning

Amazon EC2 instances with Amazon EBS volumes that use Master Boot Record (MBR) and GUID Partition Table (GPT) partitioning are supported, for both OS and data volumes, for both Windows and Linux.

Requirements

Windows Source VMs

  • You must enable Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP).

  • To access the restored, replicated, or converted Amazon EC2 instances, you must configure your host firewall (Windows firewall or similar) to allow access to RDP and to network discovery.

Linux Source VMs

  • To access the restored, replicted, or converted Amazon EC2 instances, you must enable Secure Shell (SSH), and the host firewall (such as Linux iptables) must permit access to SSH.

  • Linux VMs must use the old network interface naming, such as eth0, instead of ens192, enp1s0, and so on. For more information, see Ethernet Naming Conventions for RHEL, Oracle Linux, and Suse Linux.

  • Linux VMs must use DHCP. If the VMs use static IPs, use the AWS VM Import/Export transport mode instead.

  • Linux VMs must use GRUB (GRUB legacy) or GRUB 2 as the bootloader.

  • Linux VMs must use one of the following root file systems:

    • ext2

    • ext3

    • ext4

    • Btrfs

    • JFS

    • XFS

  • Linux VM /etc/fstab entries must use UUIDs instead of device names, because device names might change during the restore, replication, or conversion. For information about updating fstab entries to use UUIDs, see Updating fstab Entries to Use UUIDs in the Commvault knowledge base.

Disk Space

The C: drive must have 2 GiB or more of free space.

Process

The process that the Commvault software uses to perform restores, replications, and converions with the Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBS) direct APIs is as follows:

  1. Create empty Amazon EBS snapshots in the destination zone, region, or account using the ebs:StartSnapshot API.

  2. Write backup data retrieved from the Commvault storage library, and write to newly created Amazon EBS snapshot, using the ebs:PutSnapshotBlock API.

  3. Complete the Amazon EBS snapshots using the ebs:CompleteSnapshot API.

  4. Create Amazon EBS volumes from Amazon EBS snapshots.

    Note

    Amazon EBS volumes provisioned from snapshots must be initialized to achieve production performance. See Initialize Volumes.

  5. Create or reuse an instance based on the type of replication operation:

    • In case of a full replication, a new instance is created from the EBS volumes.

    • In case of an incremental replication, the EBS volumes are attached to the existing destination instance.

  6. Create an Amazon EC2 instance and attach the new Amazon EBS volumes.

  7. Delete the Amazon EBS snapshots created.

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