AWS Documentation » AWS Storage Gateway » User Guide » Getting Started » Requirements

Requirements

Unless otherwise noted, the following requirements are common to all gateway configurations.

Hardware and Storage Requirements

In this section, you can find information about the minimum hardware and settings 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 Performance Guidance for File Gateways.

Hardware Requirements for On-Premises VMs

When deploying your gateway on-premises, you must make sure that the underlying hardware on which you deploy the gateway VM can dedicate the following minimum resources:

• Four virtual processors assigned to the VM.

• 16 GiB of reserved RAM assigned to the VM.

• 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 AWS Storage Gateway Limits.

Requirements for Amazon EC2 Instance Types

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

Recommended for file gateway types

• General-purpose instance family— m4 or m5 instance type.

• Compute-optimized instance family— c4 or c5 instance types. Select the 2xlarge instance size or higher to meet the required RAM requirements.

• Memory-optimized instance family—r3 instance types.

• Storage-optimized instance family— i3 instance types.

  Note

  When you launch your gateway in EC2, and the instance type you’ve selected supports ephemeral storage, the disks will be listed automatically. To learn more about Amazon EC2 instance storage, see here. Note that 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, then the data that still resides in cache and has not yet written to S3 can be lost. Before you stop the instance that hosts the gateway make sure the CachePercentDirty CloudWatch metric is 0. For information about ephemeral storage, see Using Ephemeral Storage With EC2 Gateways. For more information about monitoring metrics for your storage gateway, see storage gateway metrics and dimensions.

  If you have more than 5 million objects in your Amazon S3 bucket and you are using a General Purposes SSD volume, a minimum root EBS volume of 350 GiB is needed for acceptable performance of your gateway during start up. For information about how to increase your volume size, see Modifying an EBS Volume from the Console.

Recommended for cached volumes and tape gateway types

• General-purpose instance family—m4 or m5 instance types. We don't recommend using the m4.16xlarge instance type.

• Compute-optimized instance family—c4 or c5 instance types. Select the 2xlarge instance size or higher to meet the required RAM requirements.

• Storage-optimized instance family—d2, i2, or i3 instance types

Note

When you create any gateway type using the c4 or m4 instance type, it can't be changed to the c5 or m5 instance type. For information about how to upgrade your instance to the c5 or m5 instance type, see You Want Your File Gateway to Use a C5 or M5 EC2 Instance Type Instead of C4 or M4.

Storage Requirements

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

The following table recommends sizes for local disk storage for your deployed gateway.

Gateway Type	Cache (Minimum)	Cache (Maximum)	Upload Buffer (Minimum)	Upload Buffer (Maximum)	Other Required Local Disks
File gateway	150 GiB	16 TiB	—	—	—
Cached volume gateway	150 GiB	16 TiB	150 GiB	2 TiB	—
Stored volume gateway	—	—	150 GiB	2 TiB	1 or more for stored volume or volumes
Tape gateway	150 GiB	16 TiB	150 GiB	2 TiB	—

Note

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

When adding cache or upload buffer 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 either a cache or upload buffer.

For information about gateway limits, see AWS Storage Gateway Limits.

Network and Firewall Requirements

Your gateway requires access to the internet, local networks, Domain Name Service (DNS) servers, firewalls, routers, and so on. Following, you can find information about required ports and how to allow access through firewalls and routers.

Note

In some cases, you might deploy AWS Storage 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.

Topics

• Port Requirements
• Networking and Firewall Requirements for the AWS Storage Gateway Hardware Appliance
• Allowing AWS Storage Gateway Access Through Firewalls and Routers
• Configuring Security Groups for Your Amazon EC2 Gateway Instance

Port Requirements

AWS 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.

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	How Used
TCP	443 (HTTPS)	Outbound	Storage Gateway	AWS	For communication from AWS 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. AWS 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 AWS Storage Gateway Management Console, the host from which you connect to the console must have access to your gateway’s port 80.
UDP/UDP	53 (DNS)	Outbound	Storage Gateway	Domain Name Service (DNS) server	For communication between AWS 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.

Ports for file gateways

The following illustration shows the ports to open for a file gateway.

Note

For specific port requirements (including NFS and SMB port requirements), see Port Requirements.

You only need to use Microsoft Active Directory when you want to allow domain users to access an 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 Active Directory in the AWS Cloud. For most AWS-managed Active Directory deployments, you need to configure the Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) service for your VPC. For more information about how to create a DHCP options set, see here.

In addition to the common ports, file gateways require the following ports.

Protocol	Port	Direction	Source	Destination	How Used
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.

Ports for volume and tape gateways

The following illustration shows the ports to open for volume and tape gateways.

In addition to the common ports, volume and tape gateways require the following port.

Protocol	Port	Direction	Source	Destination	How Used
TCP	3260 (iSCSI)	Inbound	iSCSI Initiators	Storage Gateway	By local systems to connect to iSCSI targets exposed by the gateway.

For detailed information about port requirements, see Port Requirements in the Additional AWS Storage Gateway Resources section.

Networking and Firewall Requirements for the AWS Storage Gateway Hardware Appliance

Each AWS 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.

A hardware appliance requires the following ports to operate.

Protocol	Port	Direction	Source	Destination	How Used
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 Configure Network Parameters.

Note

To see an illustration showing the back of the server with its ports, see Rack-Mount Your Hardware Appliance and Connect It to Power

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.

For more information on 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 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.

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 service endpoint is required to make API calls.

storagegateway.region.amazonaws.com:443

The Amazon S3 service endpoint, shown following, is used by file gateways only. A file gateway requires this endpoint to access the S3 bucket that a file share maps to.

If your gateway can't determine the AWS Region where your S3 bucket is located, this endpoint defaults to us-east-1.s3.amazonaws.com. We recommend that you whitelist the us-east-1 region in addition to AWS Regions where your gateway is activated, and where your S3 bucket is located.

region.s3.amazonaws.com

The Amazon CloudFront endpoint following is required for Storage Gateway to get the list of available AWS Regions.

https://d4kdq0yaxexbo.cloudfront.net/

A Storage Gateway VM is configured to use the following NTP servers.

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

Depending on your gateway's AWS Region, replace region in the endpoint with the corresponding region string. For example, if you create a gateway in the US West (Oregon) region, the endpoint looks like this: storagegateway.us-west-2.amazonaws.com:443.

• Storage Gateway—For supported AWS Regions and a list of AWS service endpoints you can use with Storage Gateway, see Regions and Endpoints in the AWS General Reference.

• AWS Storage Gateway Hardware Appliance—For supported AWS Regions you can use with the hardware appliance see AWS Storage Gateway Hardware Appliance Regions in the AWS General Reference.

Configuring Security Groups for Your Amazon EC2 Gateway Instance

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 ports 3260 (for iSCSI connections) and 80 (for activation).

• If you want to activate your gateway from an 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 EC2 Gateway.

In some cases, you might use an Amazon EC2 instance as an initiator (that is, to connect to iSCSI targets on a gateway that you deployed on Amazon EC2). In such a case, we recommend a two-step approach:

1. You should launch the initiator instance in the same security group as your gateway.

2. You should configure access so the initiator can communicate with your gateway.

For information about the ports to open for your gateway, see Port Requirements.

Supported Hypervisors and Host Requirements

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

AWS Storage Gateway supports the following hypervisor versions and hosts:

• VMware ESXi Hypervisor (version 5.5, 6.0, 6.5 or 6.7)—A free version of VMware is available on the VMware website. For this setup, you also need a VMware vSphere client to connect to the host.

• Microsoft Hyper-V Hypervisor (version 2012 R2 or 2016)—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.

• EC2 instance—AWS Storage Gateway provides an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) that contains the gateway VM image. Only file, cached volume, and tape gateway types can be deployed on Amazon EC2. For information about how to deploy a gateway on Amazon EC2, see Deploying a Volume or Tape Gateway on an Amazon EC2 Host.

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

Note

AWS 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.

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

Supported NFS Clients for a File Gateway

File gateways support the following Network File System (NFS) clients:

• Amazon Linux

• Mac OS X

• RHEL 7

• 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 a File Gateway

File gateways support the following Service Message Block (SMB) clients:

• Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and later

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

• Windows Terminal Server running on Windows Server 2003 and later

Supported File System Operations for a 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 Amazon 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 S3. Directories are managed as folder objects in S3, using the same syntax as in the Amazon S3 Management 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.

Supported iSCSI Initiators

When you deploy a cached volume or stored volume gateway, you can create iSCSI storage volumes on your gateway. When you deploy a tape gateway, the gateway is preconfigured with one media changer and 10 tape drives. These tape drives and the media changer are available to your existing client backup applications as iSCSI devices.

To connect to these iSCSI devices, AWS Storage Gateway supports the following iSCSI initiators:

• Windows Server 2012 and Windows Server 2012 R2

• Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2

• Windows 7

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7

• VMware ESX Initiator, which provides an alternative to using initiators in the guest operating systems of your VMs

Important

Storage Gateway doesn't support Microsoft Multipath I/O (MPIO) from Windows clients.

Storage Gateway supports connecting multiple hosts to the same volume if the hosts coordinate access by using Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC). However, you can't connect multiple hosts to that same volume (for example, sharing a nonclustered NTFS/ext4 file system) without using WSFC.

Supported Third-Party Backup Applications for a Tape Gateway

You use a backup application to read, write, and manage tapes with a tape gateway. The following third-party backup applications are supported to work with tape gateways.

The type of medium changer you choose depends on the backup application you plan to use. The following table lists third-party backup applications that have been tested and found to be compatible with tape gateways. This table includes the medium changer type recommended for each backup application.

Backup Application	Medium Changer Type
Arcserve Backup	AWS-Gateway-VTL
Bacula Enterprise V10.x	AWS-Gateway-VTL or STK-L700
Commvault V11	STK-L700
Dell EMC NetWorker V8.x or V9.x	AWS-Gateway-VTL
IBM Spectrum Protect v7.x	IBM-03584L32-0402
Micro Focus (HPE) Data Protector 9.x	AWS-Gateway-VTL
Microsoft System Center 2012 R2 or 2016 Data Protection Manager	STK-L700
NovaStor DataCenter/Network 6.4 or 7.1	STK-L700
Quest NetVault Backup 10.0 or 11.x or 12.x	STK-L700
Veeam Backup & Replication V7 or V8	STK-L700
Veeam Backup & Replication V9 Update 2 or later	AWS-Gateway-VTL
Veritas Backup Exec 2014 or 15 or 16 or 20.x	AWS-Gateway-VTL
Veritas Backup Exec 2012 Note Veritas has ended support for Backup Exec 2012. For more information, see End of Support for Prior Backup Exec Versions.	STK-L700
Veritas NetBackup Version 7.x or 8.x	AWS-Gateway-VTL

Important

We highly recommend that you choose the medium changer that's listed for your backup application. Other medium changers might not function properly. You can choose a different medium changer after the gateway is activated. For more information, see Selecting a Medium Changer After Gateway Activation.