Requirements

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

Hardware and storage requirements

This section describes the minimum hardware and settings for your gateway and the minimum amount of disk space to allocate for the required storage.

Hardware requirements for VMs

When deploying your gateway, 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.

• For Volume Gateway, your hardware should dedicate the following amounts of RAM:

  • 16 GiB of reserved RAM for gateways with cache size up to 16 TiB

  • 32 GiB of reserved RAM for gateways with cache size 16 TiB to 32 TiB

  • 48 GiB of reserved RAM for gateways with cache size 32 TiB to 64 TiB

• 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 quotas.

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.

For Volume Gateway, your Amazon EC2 instance should dedicate the following amounts of RAM depending on the cache size you plan to use for your gateway:

• 16 GiB of reserved RAM for gateways with cache size up to 16 TiB

• 32 GiB of reserved RAM for gateways with cache size 16 TiB to 32 TiB

• 48 GiB of reserved RAM for gateways with cache size 32 TiB to 64 TiB

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

Recommended for cached volumes and Tape 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.

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
Cached Volume Gateway	150 GiB	64 TiB	150 GiB	2 TiB	—
Stored Volume Gateway	—	—	150 GiB	2 TiB	1 or more for stored volume or volumes

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 quotas, see AWS Storage Gateway quotas.

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 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.

Note

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. In some cases, you might deploy Storage Gateway on Amazon EC2 or use other types of deployment

Topics

• Port requirements
• Networking and firewall requirements for the Storage Gateway Hardware Appliance
• Allowing AWS Storage Gateway access through firewalls and routers
• Configuring security groups for your Amazon EC2 gateway instance

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.

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 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 Management 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	Domain Name Service (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.

Ports for volume and Tape Gateways

The following illustration shows the ports to open for Volume Gateway.

In addition to the common ports, Volume Gateway requires 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 Storage Gateway resources section.

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.

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 Configuring network parameters.

Note

For an illustration showing the back of the server with its ports, see Rack-mounting your hardware appliance and connecting 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 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

Depending on your gateway's AWS Region, replace region in the service endpoint with the correct region string.

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

s3.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

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.

bucketname.s3.region.amazonaws.com

The following example is an S3 service endpoint in the US East (Ohio) Region (us-east-2).

s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com

Note

If your gateway can't determine the AWS Region where your 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 AWS Regions where your gateway is activated, and where your S3 bucket is located.

The following are S3 service endpoints for 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))

The following example is a FIPS service endpoint for an S3 bucket in the AWS GovCloud (US-West) Region.

bucket-name.s3-fips.us-gov-west-1.amazonaws.com

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

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

• Storage Gateway Hardware Appliance—For supported AWS Regions you can use with the hardware appliance see 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 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 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 Storage Gateway on-premises as either a virtual machine (VM) appliance, or a physical hardware appliance, or in AWS as an Amazon EC2 instance.

Note

When a manufacturer ends general support for a hypervisor version, Storage Gateway also ends support for that hypervisor version. For detailed information about support for specific versions of a hypervisor, see the manufacturer's documentation.

Storage Gateway supports the following hypervisor versions and hosts:

• VMware ESXi Hypervisor (version 7.0 or 8.0) – 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, 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, 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. 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 an Amazon EC2 instance to host your Volume Gateway.

• Storage Gateway Hardware Appliance – Storage Gateway provides a physical hardware appliance as a 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 iSCSI initiators

When you deploy a cached volume or stored Volume Gateway, you can create iSCSI storage volumes on your gateway.

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

• Windows Server 2019

• Windows Server 2016

• Windows Server 2012 R2

• Windows 10

• Windows 8.1

• 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.