Using an Amazon Storage Gateway on the Cloudhelix platform

After our previous post that demonstrated using an Amazon Storage Gateway, we had a couple of enquiries from customers, asking whether they could deploy this inside their Cloudhelix VDC to add some off-site archive storage. The answer is yes?—?you can!

The current version of the AWS cloud Storage Gateway has been uploaded to the Cloudhelix Public Catalog, so you can deploy it as a new vApp into your VDC as normal.

If required, switch to the advanced networking workflow and configure a manual IP address.

The next step is to allocate disks to the VM?—?gateway-cached volumes require an upload buffer (minimum recommended size 150Gb) and an cache disk (minimum recommended size 1.1x upload buffer). For an overview of the architecture, click here.

Edit the VM and add the two disks?—?here we have used the minimum as an example. Ensure that the Bus Type is Paravirtual.

Start the vApp?—?once it boots, you can log into the console using the credentials listed on the screen, and make basic changes if required.

It’s worth checking the network config (menu 2 -> menu 1 -> eth0), and then going into menu 3 (Test Network Connectivity) then option 4 (eu-west-1) to ensure connectivity is working.

Feel free to run a traceroute to one of these hostnames from one of your servers, to ensure that traffic is being securely routed via our Amazon Direct Connect network as opposed to via the public internet.

At this point, you are ready to activate the gateway. If you are not a Cloudhelix Amazon Managed Services customer, log into your Amazon account and choose Storage Gateway from the Storage & Content Delivery section. Choose the Gateway-cached volumes configuration and then click Continue through the wizard until you are prompted to enter the IP of the gateway?—?note that you will need connectivity to the gateway IP from your browser.

Once activated, you can allocate the VM’s disks as upload buffer and cache storage under Gateway -> Configure Local Storage and create volumes (with optional CHAP authentication) in the Volumes section.

You are now ready to connect to the volume using an iSCSI initiator from one of your servers. Don’t forget, you can use Amazon Cloudwatch to monitor metrics, such as Queued Writes.