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 a 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

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.

  For information, see Deploying a Linux Commvault Access Node from the AWS Marketplace.

• Use one of the following Linux distributions:

  • Amazon Linux 2 (recommended)

    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.

    When you use an AWS instance with a 64-bit ARM processor as a Linux access node, you can back up instances and restore full instances, but you cannot restore guest files.

  • RHEL 8.5, 8.3, 8.2, 8.1, 8.0, 7.9, 7.8, 7.7, 7.6, 7.5, 7.4

    Note

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

The following features are not supported when using a Linux access node. Use a Windows access node for these operations.

• Full instance restores (import method)

• Conversion from another hypervisor to Amazon EC2 (import method)

• Live sync replication (import method)

For cross-hypervisor restores or replication from VMware to Amazon, you can use an access node that runs on Windows or Linux. If you use an access node that runs on Linux, for both Windows and Linux guest VMs, the drivers must be installed on the source before performing the backup. Otherwise, the replication operation fails. You cannot use a Linux access node for the import method.

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 2022

• Windows Server 2019

• Windows Server 2016

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.

Amazon EC2 Instance Families

The Amazon Linux 2 and Graviton2 EC2 instance families that are supported as access nodes include the following:

• Amazon EC2 cost and performance optimized (A1)

• Amazon EC2 general purpose (M6g, M6gd, T4g)

• Amazon EC2 compute optimized (C6g, C6gd, C6gn, C7g)

• Amazon EC2 memory optimized (R6g, R6gd, X2gd)

IAM Permissions

Commvault requires certain IAM permissions to perform data management operations in the AWS cloud. For more information about the required IAM permissions, see Requirements and Usage for AWS IAM Policies and Permissions.

Other Requirements

For access nodes running on Amazon EC2 instances, the following additional requirements apply:

• Windows Server instances must have the most recent paravirtual (PV) driver.

• EBS optimized, high IOPS volume.

• For streaming backups and backup copies, the access node must be available in the same user account as the instance being backed up or restored. This requirement does not apply to IntelliSnap backups.

Network Connectivity

• Access nodes require 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 as described in the AWS article VPC peering basics.

• The access node must be able to connect to ec2.amazonaws.com, or to the regional equivalent if the AWS account is restricted to specific regions. To route communications through an HTTP or HTTPS proxy, see Configuring an HTTP Proxy for an Amazon EC2 Server Group.