System Requirements for Protecting Amazon EC2 with Commvault

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

Access Node

• The access node can be deployed in the same region, availability zone, or AWS account as the protected data.

• The access node can be deployed in an alternate region, availability zone, or AWS account as the protected data.

  Amazon EBS direct API restores for AWS provide optimal restore performance across regions, availability zones, and accounts.

  Note

  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 Admin Account.

• For VM conversion and restores, the access node can be an AWS instance or an external machine.

• For IntelliSnap backups and restores from IntelliSnap jobs, the access node can be an AWS instance or an external machine.

IntelliSnap Only

Access nodes that are used to perform Amazon EC2, Amazon EBS, and Amazon RDS snapshot backup and snapshot replication require the following hardware:

• 2 vCPU

• 4 GB RAM

A single access node can service multiple regions and availability zones. This access node may contain a deduplication database (DDB) for writing index data.

IntelliSnap and Streaming

Access nodes that are used to perform snapshot management and streaming backups of Amazon EC2, Amazon DynamoDB, and Amazon RDS (dump/export), require the following hardware:

• 4 vCPU

• 16 GB RAM

The access node may be scaled vertically or horizontally to achieve additional throughput based on data volume. This access node may contain a DDB for index data and streamed data.

Processor Architecture

The Virtual Server Agent (VSA) for Amazon Web Services is supported on the following processor architectures:

• x64 (Linux, Windows)

• ARM

Operating System

Linux

Configure an access node on a Linux instance using one of the following methods:

• Deploy an AWS Marketplace AMI to serve as a Virtual Server Agent access node for AWS.

• Virtual Server Agent (VSA) for Amazon Web Services is supported on the following Linux distributions:

  • Amazon Linux 2 (recommended)

  • CentOS 7.4, 7.5, 7.6, 7.7, 7.8, 7.9, 8.0, 8.1, 8.2, or 8.3

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

    Note

    For CentOS 8, Oracle Linux (OL8.x), or RHEL 8 instances, to install operating system packages that must enable automatic installation of Mono, register the instances with CentOS, Oracle, or Red Hat.

• Configure an Amazon Linux instance that uses a 64-bit Arm processor with the required software.

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

Windows

Hard Drive

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.

Instance Families

The Virtual Server Agent (VSA) package is supported on Amazon Linux 2 and Gravitron2 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 management operations in the AWS cloud. For more information about the required IAM permissions, see Amazon Web Services User Permissions for Backups and Restores.

Other Requirements

For VSA proxies running on AWS instances, the following additional requirements apply:

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

• EBS optimized, high IOPS volume.

• For streaming backups and backup copies, if the access node used for backups and restores is running on an Amazon EC2 instance, 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

• 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.

Related Topics

• System Requirements for Virtual Server Agent with Amazon Web Services

• Linux Access Node Support for Amazon Web Services