Working with Agents
An agent is a virtual machine (VM) that is owned by the user, and is used to read or write data from an on-premises storage system. To create an agent to read from an on-premises source location, you download the AWS DataSync .ova image and deploy it in a VMware ESXi hypervisor and activate it.
Note
The default credentials for the OVA are login: admin, password: password. You can change the password on the VM local console. You don't need to log in to the VM for basic DataSync functionality. The credentials are needed for troubleshooting tasks such as running a connectivity test or opening a support channel with AWS, and network-specific settings such as setting up a static IP address. For information about how to access the VM local console, see Configuring Your Agent on the VM Local Console.
Topics
Using Multiple Agents for a Location
For most workloads, we recommend that you activate one agent for each on-premises location. However, there are a couple of exceptions:
-
Some workloads have millions of small files. In these cases, we recommend four agents for each on-premises location.
-
In some environments, each agent is on a network link less than 2.5 Gbps in bandwidth. For such environments, or environments that are otherwise network-limited, we recommend four agents for each on-premises location.
If you use multiple agents for a source location, the status of all the agents must be available for the task to run.
Note
If one of the source agents becomes unavailable, locations that include that unavailable agent can’t be used, even if the other agents are available.
