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System Requirements for Protecting Amazon EC2 Instances

Verify that your environment meets the system requirements for protecting Amazon EC2 instances with Commvault.

Access Nodes

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 an admin account, the access node can be in the admin account. For more information, see Using Resources from an AWS Admin 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 System

Linux

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

  • Deploy an AWS Marketplace AMI.

    From AWS Marketplace AMI, 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 guest files. This AMI contains all the components that are required to support Linux operations in the Commvault environment. For more information, see Deploying a Commvault Linux Access Node from the AWS Marketplace.

  • Use one of the following Linux distributions:

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

    • Amazon Linux 2023 64-bit (x86)

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

    • 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.

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)

  • Conversion from another hypervisor to Amazon EC2 (import method) is not supported when using a Linux access node to convert a Windows guest VM

  • Live sync replication (import method)

For cross-hypervisor restores or replication from VMware to Amazon EC2, 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 Windows-compatible processors are supported.

- Microsoft Windows Server 2019 Editions 64-bit (x86)

- Microsoft Windows Server 2016 Editions 64-bit (x86)

Note

Microsoft ended mainstream support for all versions of Windows Server 2012 and Windows Server 2012 R2—including Hyper-V Server 2012 and Hyper-V Server 2012 R2, and Core Editions—on October 10, 2023.

Hardware

Backup type

Requirements

More information

IntelliSnap only

  • 2 vCPU

  • 4 GB RAM

This access node can contain a deduplication database (DDB) for writing index data.

IntelliSnap and streaming

  • 4 vCPU

  • 16 GB RAM

This access node can contain a DDB for index data and streamed data.

Processor Architecture

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 Virtual Server Agent (VSA) package is supported on Amazon Linux 2 and Graviton2 EC2 instance families that 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 protection operations in the AWS cloud. For more information about the required IAM permissions, see How Commvault Uses AWS Permissions for Amazon EC2 Instance Protection.

Other Requirements

Amazon EC2 access nodes that run on Amazon EC2 instances must meet the following additional requirements:

  • Windows Server instances where the Virtual Server Agent is installed must upgrade to the latest paravirtual (PV) driver.

  • EBS optimized, high IOPS volume.

Network Connectivity

  • The Virtual Server Agent requires 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 machine 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.

Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) with Amazon EC2

Commvault supports data protection and management for Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) on Amazon EC2.

System Requirements for Virtual Server Agent with Amazon EC2 in the Expert documentation

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