File Gateway setup requirements - AWS Storage Gateway

File Gateway setup requirements

Unless otherwise noted, the following requirements are common to all File Gateway types in AWS Storage Gateway. Your setup must meet the requirements in this section. Review the requirements that apply to your gateway setup before you deploy your gateway.

Prerequisites

Before you set up your Amazon S3 File Gateway (S3 File Gateway), you must meet the following prerequisites:

  • Configure Microsoft Active Directory (AD) and create an Active Directory service account with the requisite permissions. For more information, see Active Directory service account permission requirements.

  • Ensure that there is sufficient network bandwidth between the gateway and AWS. A minimum of 100 Mbps is required to successfully download, activate, and update the gateway.

  • Configure the connection you want to use for network traffic between AWS and the on-premises environment where you are deploying your gateway. You can connect using the public internet, private networking, a VPN, or AWS Direct Connect. If you want your gateway to communicate AWS through a private connection to an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud, set up the Amazon VPC before you set up your gateway.

  • Make sure your gateway can resolve the name of your Active Directory Domain Controller. You can use DHCP in your Active Directory domain to handle resolution, or specify a DNS server manually from the Network Configuration settings menu in the gateway local console.

Hardware and storage requirements

The following sections provide information about the minimum required hardware and storage configurations for your gateway, and the minimum amount of disk space to allocate for the required storage.

For information about best practices for File Gateway performance, see Basic performance guidance for S3 File Gateway.

Hardware requirements for on-premises VMs

When deploying your gateway on-premises, ensure that the underlying hardware on which you deploy the gateway virtual machine (VM) can dedicate the following minimum resources:

  • Four virtual processors assigned to the VM

  • 16 GiB of reserved RAM for File Gateways

  • 80 GiB of disk space for installation of VM image and system data

For more information, see Optimizing gateway performance. For information about how your hardware affects the performance of the gateway VM, see Quotas for file shares.

Requirements for Amazon EC2 instance types

When deploying your gateway on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), the instance size must be at least xlarge for your gateway to function. However, for the compute-optimized instance family the size must be at least 2xlarge.

Note

The Storage Gateway AMI is only compatible with x86-based instances that use Intel or AMD processors. ARM-based instances that use Graviton processors are not supported.

Use one of the following instance types recommended for your gateway type.

Recommended for File Gateway types

  • General-purpose instance family – m4, m5, or m6 instance type.

    Note

    We don't recommend using the m4.16xlarge instance type.

  • Compute-optimized instance family – c4, c5, or c6 instance types. Choose the 2xlarge instance size or higher to meet the required RAM requirements.

  • Memory-optimized instance family – r3, r5, or r6 instance types.

  • Storage-optimized instance family – i3 or i4 instance types.

    Note

    When you launch your gateway in Amazon EC2 and the instance type you choose supports ephemeral storage, the disks are listed automatically. For more information about Amazon EC2 instance storage, see Instance storage in the Amazon EC2 User Guide.

    Application writes are stored in the cache synchronously, and then asynchronously uploaded to durable storage in Amazon S3. If the ephemeral storage is lost because an instance stops before the upload is complete, the data that still resides in the cache and has not yet written to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) can be lost. Before you stop the instance that hosts the gateway, make sure that the CachePercentDirty CloudWatch metric is 0. For information about ephemeral storage, see Using ephemeral storage with EC2 gateways. For information about monitoring metrics for your Storage Gateway, see Monitoring your S3 File Gateway.

    If you have more than 5 million objects in your S3 bucket and you are using a gp2 EBS volume, a minimum root EBS volume of 350 GiB is required for acceptable performance of your gateway during start up. Newly-created Amazon EC2 File Gateway instances use gp3 root volumes by default, which do not have this requirement. For information about how to increase the volume size, see Modifying an EBS volume using elastic volumes (console).

Storage requirements

In addition to 80 GiB of disk space for the VM, you also need additional disks for your gateway.

Gateway type Cache (minimum) Cache (maximum)
File Gateway 150 GiB 64 TiB
Note

You can configure one or more local drives for your cache, up to the maximum capacity.

When adding cache to an existing gateway, it's important to create new disks in your host (hypervisor or Amazon EC2 instance). Don't change the size of existing disks if the disks have been previously allocated as a cache.

For information about gateway quotas, see Quotas for file shares.

Network and firewall requirements

Your gateway requires access to the internet, local networks, Domain Name Service (DNS) servers, firewalls, routers, and so on.

Network bandwidth requirements vary based on the quantity of data that is uploaded and downloaded by the gateway. A minimum of 100Mbps is required to successfully download, activate, and update the gateway. Your data transfer patterns will determine the bandwidth necessary to support your workload.

Following, you can find information about required ports and how to allow access through firewalls and routers.

Note

In some cases, you might deploy your gateway on Amazon EC2 or use other types of deployment (including on-premises) with network security policies that restrict AWS IP address ranges. In these cases, your gateway might experience service connectivity issues when the AWS IP range values changes. The AWS IP address range values that you need to use are in the Amazon service subset for the AWS Region that you activate your gateway in. For the current IP range values, see AWS IP address ranges in the AWS General Reference.

Port requirements

Storage Gateway requires certain ports to be allowed for its operation. The following illustrations show the required ports that you must allow for each type of gateway. Some ports are required by all gateway types, and others are required by specific gateway types. For more information about port requirements, see Port requirements for S3 File Gateway.

Common ports for all gateway types

The following ports are common to all gateway types and are required by all gateway types.

Protocol

Port

Direction

Source

Destination

Usage

TCP

443 (HTTPS)

Outbound

Storage Gateway

AWS

For communication from Storage Gateway to the AWS service endpoint. For information about service endpoints, see Allowing AWS Storage Gateway access through firewalls and routers.

TCP

80 (HTTP)

Inbound

The host from which you connect to the AWS Management Console.

Storage Gateway

By local systems to obtain the Storage Gateway activation key. Port 80 is only used during activation of the Storage Gateway appliance.

Storage Gateway does not require port 80 to be publicly accessible. The required level of access to port 80 depends on your network configuration. If you activate your gateway from the Storage Gateway console, the host from which you connect to the console must have access to your gateway’s port 80.

TCP/UDP

53 (DNS)

Outbound

Storage Gateway

DNS server

For communication between Storage Gateway and the DNS server.

TCP

22 (Support channel)

Outbound

Storage Gateway

AWS Support

Allows AWS Support to access your gateway to help you with troubleshooting gateway issues. You don't need this port open for the normal operation of your gateway, but it is required for troubleshooting.

UDP

123 (NTP)

Outbound

NTP client

NTP server

Used by local systems to synchronize VM time to the host time.

Note

Not required for gateways hosted on Amazon EC2.

TCP

1026

Outbound

Used for control traffic.

TCP

1027

Outbound

Used only during activation and can then be closed.

TCP

1028

Outbound

Used for control traffic.

TCP

1031

Outbound

Used only for software updates for file gateways.

Ports for File Gateways

The following illustration shows the ports to open for an S3 File Gateway.

network resources connected to Storage Gateway using various ports.
Note

For specific port requirements, see Port requirements for S3 File Gateway.

For S3 File Gateway, you only need to use Microsoft Active Directory when you want to allow domain users to access a Server Message Block (SMB) file share. You can join your File Gateway to any valid Microsoft Windows domain (resolvable by DNS).

You can also use the AWS Directory Service to create an AWS Managed Microsoft AD in the Amazon Web Services Cloud. For most AWS Managed Microsoft AD deployments, you need to configure the Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) service for your VPC. For information about creating a DHCP options set, see Create a DHCP options set in the AWS Directory Service Administration Guide.

In addition to the common ports, Amazon S3 File Gateway requires the following ports.

Protocol

Port

Direction

Source

Destination

Usage

TCP/UDP

2049 (NFS)

Inbound

NFS clients

Storage Gateway

For local systems to connect to NFS shares that your gateway exposes.

TCP/UDP

111 (NFSv3)

Inbound

NFSv3 client

Storage Gateway

For local systems to connect to the port mapper that your gateway exposes.

Note

This port is needed only for NFSv3.

TCP/UDP

20048 (NFSv3)

Inbound

NFSv3 client

Storage Gateway

For local systems to connect to mounts that your gateway exposes.

Note

This port is needed only for NFSv3.

TCP/UDP LDAP

389

Inbound and outbound

Storage Gateway

Microsoft Active Directory

Directory System Agent (DSA); client connection

TCP/UDP Kerberos

88

Inbound and outbound

Storage Gateway

Microsoft Active Directory

TCP Distributed Computing Environment/End Point Mapper (DCE/EMAP)

135

Inbound and outbound

Storage Gateway

Microsoft Active Directory

Networking and firewall requirements for the Storage Gateway Hardware Appliance

Each Storage Gateway Hardware Appliance requires the following network services:

  • Internet access – an always-on network connection to the internet through any network interface on the server.

  • DNS services – DNS services for communication between the hardware appliance and DNS server.

  • Time synchronization – an automatically configured Amazon NTP time service must be reachable.

  • IP address – A DHCP or static IPv4 address assigned. You cannot assign an IPv6 address.

There are five physical network ports at the rear of the Dell PowerEdge R640 server. From left to right (facing the back of the server) these ports are as follows:

  1. iDRAC

  2. em1

  3. em2

  4. em3

  5. em4

You can use the iDRAC port for remote server management.

network resources connected to hardware appliance using various ports.

A hardware appliance requires the following ports to operate.

Protocol

Port

Direction

Source

Destination

Usage

SSH

22

Outbound

Hardware appliance

54.201.223.107

Support channel
DNS 53 Outbound Hardware appliance DNS servers Name resolution
UDP/NTP 123 Outbound Hardware appliance *.amazon.pool.ntp.org Time synchronization
HTTPS

443

Outbound

Hardware appliance

*.amazonaws.com

Data transfer

HTTP 8080 Inbound AWS Hardware appliance Activation (only briefly)

To perform as designed, a hardware appliance requires network and firewall settings as follows:

  • Configure all connected network interfaces in the hardware console.

  • Make sure that each network interface is on a unique subnet.

  • Provide all connected network interfaces with outbound access to the endpoints listed in the diagram preceding.

  • Configure at least one network interface to support the hardware appliance. For more information, see Configuring hardware appliance network parameters.

Note

For an illustration showing the back of the server with its ports, see Physically installing your hardware appliance.

All IP addresses on the same network interface (NIC), whether for a gateway or a host, must be on the same subnet. The following illustration shows the addressing scheme.

host IP and service IP on a single subnet sharing one NIC.

For more information about activating and configuring a hardware appliance, see Using the AWS Storage Gateway Hardware Appliance.

Allowing AWS Storage Gateway access through firewalls and routers

Your gateway requires access to the following service endpoints to communicate with AWS. If you use a firewall or router to filter or limit network traffic, you must configure your firewall and router to allow these service endpoints for outbound communication to AWS.

Note

If you configure private VPC endpoints for your Storage Gateway to use for connection and data transfer to and from AWS, your gateway does not require access to the public internet. For more information, see Activating a gateway in a virtual private cloud.

Important

Replace region in the following endpoint examples with the correct AWS Region string for your gateway, such as us-west-2.

Replace amzn-s3-demo-bucket with the actual name of the Amazon S3 bucket in your deployment. You can also use an asterisk (*) in place of amzn-s3-demo-bucket to create a wildcard entry in your firewall rules, which will allowlist the service endpoint for all bucket names.

If your gateways are deployed in AWS Regions in the United States or Canada and require Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) compliant endpoint connections, replace s3 with s3-fips.

The following service endpoint is required by all gateways for head-bucket operations.

bucket-name.s3.region.amazonaws.com:443

The following service endpoints are required by all gateways for control path (anon-cp, client-cp, proxy-app) and data path (dp-1) operations.

anon-cp.storagegateway.region.amazonaws.com:443 client-cp.storagegateway.region.amazonaws.com:443 proxy-app.storagegateway.region.amazonaws.com:443 dp-1.storagegateway.region.amazonaws.com:443

The following gateway service endpoint is required to make API calls.

storagegateway.region.amazonaws.com:443

The following example is a gateway service endpoint in the US West (Oregon) Region (us-west-2).

storagegateway.us-west-2.amazonaws.com:443

Amazon S3 service endpoints

Amazon S3 File Gateway requires the following 3 types of endpoints to connect to the Amazon S3 service:

Amazon S3 service endpoint

Note

For this endpoint only, do not replace s3 with s3-fips for FIPS-compliant deployments.

s3.amazonaws.com

Amazon S3 regional endpoints

s3.region.amazonaws.com

The following example shows an Amazon S3 regional endpoint in the US East (Ohio) Region (us-east-2).

s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com

The following example shows a FIPS-compliant Amazon S3 regional endpoint in the US West (N. California) Region (us-west-1).

s3-fips.us-west-1.amazonaws.com

The following examples show the Amazon S3 regional endpoints used by AWS GovCloud (US) Regions:

s3-fips.us-gov-west-1.amazonaws.com (AWS GovCloud (US-West) Region (FIPS)) s3-fips.us-gov-east-1.amazonaws.com (AWS GovCloud (US-East) Region (FIPS)) s3.us-gov-west-1.amazonaws.com (AWS GovCloud (US-West) Region (Standard)) s3.us-gov-east-1.amazonaws.com (AWS GovCloud (US-East) Region (Standard))
Note

If your gateway can't determine the AWS Region where your Amazon S3 bucket is located, this service endpoint defaults to s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com. We recommend that you allow access to the US East (N. Virginia) Region (us-east-1) in addition to the AWS Regions where your gateway is activated, and where your Amazon S3 bucket is located.

Amazon S3 bucket endpoints

bucket-name.s3.region.amazonaws.com

The following example shows an Amazon S3 bucket endpoint for a bucket named amzn-s3-demo-bucket in the US East (Ohio) Region (us-east-2).

amzn-s3-demo-bucket.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com

The following example shows a FIPS-compliant Amazon S3 bucket endpoint for a bucket named amzn-s3-demo-bucket1 in the AWS GovCloud (US-East) Region (us-gov-east-1).

amzn-s3-demo-bucket1.s3-fips.us-gov-east-1.amazonaws.com

In addition to the Storage Gateway and Amazon S3 service endpoints, Storage Gateway VMs also require network access to the following NTP servers:

0.amazon.pool.ntp.org 1.amazon.pool.ntp.org 2.amazon.pool.ntp.org 3.amazon.pool.ntp.org

Configuring security groups for your Amazon EC2 gateway instance

In AWS Storage Gateway, a security group controls traffic to your Amazon EC2 gateway instance. When you configure a security group, we recommend the following:

  • The security group should not allow incoming connections from the outside internet. It should allow only instances within the gateway security group to communicate with the gateway.

    If you need to allow instances to connect to the gateway from outside its security group, we recommend that you allow connections only on port 80 (for activation).

  • If you want to activate your gateway from an Amazon EC2 host outside the gateway security group, allow incoming connections on port 80 from the IP address of that host. If you cannot determine the activating host's IP address, you can open port 80, activate your gateway, and then close access on port 80 after completing activation.

  • Allow port 22 access only if you are using AWS Support for troubleshooting purposes. For more information, see You want AWS Support to help troubleshoot your Amazon EC2 gateway.

For information about the ports to open for your gateway, see Port requirements for S3 File Gateway.

Supported hypervisors and host requirements

You can run Storage Gateway on-premises as either a virtual machine (VM) appliance or a physical hardware appliance, or in AWS as an Amazon EC2 instance.

Storage Gateway supports the following hypervisor versions and hosts:

  • VMware ESXi Hypervisor (version 7.0 or 8.0) – For this setup, you also need a VMware vSphere client to connect to the host.

  • Microsoft Hyper-V Hypervisor (version 2012 R2, 2016, 2019, or 2022) – A free, standalone version of Hyper-V is available at the Microsoft Download Center. For this setup, you need a Microsoft Hyper-V Manager on a Microsoft Windows client computer to connect to the host.

  • Linux Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) – A free, open-source virtualization technology. KVM is included in all versions of Linux version 2.6.20 and newer. Storage Gateway is tested and supported for the CentOS/RHEL 7.7, RHEL 8.6 Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 18.04 LTS distributions. Any other modern Linux distribution may work, but function or performance is not guaranteed. We recommend this option if you already have a KVM environment up and running and you are already familiar with how KVM works.

  • Amazon EC2 instance – Storage Gateway provides an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) that contains the gateway VM image. For information about how to deploy a gateway on Amazon EC2, see Deploy a default Amazon EC2 host for S3 File Gateway.

  • Storage Gateway Hardware Appliance – Storage Gateway provides a physical hardware appliance as an on-premises deployment option for locations with limited virtual machine infrastructure.

Note

Storage Gateway doesn’t support recovering a gateway from a VM that was created from a snapshot or clone of another gateway VM or from your Amazon EC2 AMI. If your gateway VM malfunctions, activate a new gateway and recover your data to that gateway. For more information, see Recovering from an unexpected virtual machine shutdown.

Storage Gateway doesn’t support dynamic memory and virtual memory ballooning.

Supported NFS clients for File Gateway

File Gateway supports the following Network File System (NFS) clients:

  • Amazon Linux

  • Mac OS X

    Note

    We recommend setting the rsize and wsize mount options to 1MB (or to maximum supported on client side) to improve performance when mounting NFS file shares on Mac OS X.

  • RHEL 7, RHEL 8.6

  • SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12

  • Ubuntu 14.04

  • Microsoft Windows 10 Enterprise, Windows Server 2012, and Windows Server 2016. Native clients only support NFS version 3.

  • Windows 7 Enterprise and Windows Server 2008.

    Native clients only support NFS v3. The maximum supported NFS I/O size is 32 KB, so you might experience degraded performance on these versions of Windows.

    Note

    You can now use SMB file shares when access is required through Windows (SMB) clients instead of using Windows NFS clients.

Supported SMB clients for File Gateway

File Gateway supports the following Service Message Block (SMB) clients:

  • Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 and later

  • Windows desktop versions: 10, 8, and 7.

  • Windows Terminal Server running on Windows Server 2008 and later

    Note

    Server Message Block encryption requires clients that support SMB v3.x dialects.

Supported file system operations for File Gateway

Your NFS or SMB client can write, read, delete, and truncate files. When clients send writes to AWS Storage Gateway, it writes to local cache synchronously. Then it writes to Amazon S3 asynchronously through optimized transfers. Reads are first served through the local cache. If data is not available, it's fetched through S3 as a read-through cache.

Writes and reads are optimized in that only the parts that are changed or requested are transferred through your gateway. Deletes remove objects from Amazon S3. Directories are managed as folder objects in S3, using the same syntax as in the Amazon S3 console.

HTTP operations such as GET, PUT, UPDATE, and DELETE can modify files in a file share. These operations conform to the atomic create, read, update, and delete (CRUD) functions.