AWS EC2 installation

This section covers the virtual machine requirements for installation of a dedicated Continuous Compliance Engine on Amazon's Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) platform.

For best performance, the Continuous Compliance Engine and all database/file servers should be in the same AWS region.

The following topics are covered:

Instance Types
Network Configuration
EBS Configuration
General Storage Configuration
Additional AWS Configuration Notes

Instance types

The Continuous Compliance Engine can run on a variety of different instances, including large memory instances (preferred) and high I/O instances. We recommend the following large memory and high I/O instances:

Requirements

Notes

Memory Optimized instance families:

The minimum requirements are listed below:

8 vCPUs minimum
64 GB RAM minimum
10 Gbps min (25 Gbps recommended)
Enhanced Networking
Processors: Intel or AMD (No ARM/Graviton)
Storage: SSD (No HDD)

Recommended instance families:

R4
R5n

Larger instance types provide more CPU, which can prevent resource shortfalls under high I/O throughput conditions.
Larger memory instances can be utilized by the Delphix Engine for operations such as job execution or Engine Sync Import/Export.
Information on AWS instances

On the AWS EC2 platform, the Continuous Compliance Engine must have sufficient memory to operate when multiple masking jobs are running. Our recommendation is to provide 8 GB of memory for the Continuous Compliance Engine in addition to any memory that will be used by running jobs.

Network configuration

Requirements	Notes
Virtual Private Cloud	- You must deploy the Delphix Engine and Data sources (database / file servers) in a VPC network to ensure that private IP addresses are static and do not change when you restart instances. - When adding environments to the Delphix Engine, you must use the host's VPC (static private) IP addresses.
Static Public IP	The EC2 Delphix instance must be launched with a static IP address; however, the default behavior for VPC instances is to launch with a dynamic public IP address – which can change whenever you restart the instance. If you're using a public IP address for your Delphix Engine, static IP addresses can only be achieved by using assigned AWS Elastic IP Addresses.
Security Group Configuration	The default security group will only open port 22 for SSH access. You must modify the security group to allow access to all of the networking ports used by the Delphix Engine and the various source and target engines.

Storage configurations

You must always attach a minimum of 2 storage pools to the Delphix Engine; one for rpool and other for domain0 pool.

EBS configuration

Deploying Delphix on AWS EC2 requires EBS-provisioned IOPS volumes. Since EBS volumes are connected to EC2 instances via the network, other network activity on the instance can affect throughput to EBS volumes. EBS-optimized instances provide guaranteed throughput to EBS volumes and are required to provide consistent and predictable storage performance.

Requirements

Notes

EBS Provisioned IOPS Volumes

All attached storage devices must be EBS volumes.

- Delphix does not support the use of instance store volumes.
- Use EBS volumes with provisioned IOPs in order to provide consistent and predictable performance. The number of provisioned IOPs depends on the estimated IO workload on the Delphix Engine.
- Provisioned IOPs volumes must be configured with a volume size to provisioned IOPs per the EBS Volume Types guidelines.
- I/O requests of up to 256 kilobytes (KB) are counted as a single I/O operation (IOP) for provisioned IOPs volumes. Each volume can be configured for up to 4,000 IOPs.

System disk

The minimum recommended storage size for the System Disk is 127 GB.

Metadata disk(s)

The minimum recommended storage size of the Metadata Volume is 50 GB.

General storage configuration

Requirements

Notes

- Allocate initial storage equal to the size of the physical source database storage.
- Add storage when storage capacity approaches 30% free.

- For high redo rates and/or high DB change rates, allocate an additional 10-20 %.
- Add new storage by provisioning new volumes of the same size.
- This enables the Delphix File System (DxFS) to make sure that its file systems are always consistent on disk without additional serialization. This also enables the Delphix Engine to achieve higher I/O rates by queueing more I/O operations to its storage.

EBS Volume Size and Count
- Keep all EBS volumes the same size. Maximize Delphix Engine RAM for a larger system cache to service reads
- Use at least 4 EBS volumes to maximize performance.

This enables the Delphix File System (DxFS) to make sure that its file systems are always consistent on disk without additional serialization. This also enables the Delphix Engine to achieve higher I/O rates by queueing more I/O operations to its storage.

Additional AWS configuration notes

Using storage other than EBS is not supported.
Limits on the number of volumes are dictated by the EBS instance type, and is generally advised that over 40 can be expected to cause issue on Linux VMs. More information can be found in the AWS Volume Limits and AWS Volume Constraints articles. The maximum device limit imposed by AWS can be handled by the Delphix Engine.
The use of the local SSDs attached to i2 instance types is not supported.
Using fast storage for EBS volumes is supported and recommended, including (in order of decreasing speed):
- Provisioned IOPS (io1) volumes (recommended).
- Virtual Machine Requirements for AWS EC2 Platform
- General Purpose SSD (gp2) volumes (supported)
- Throughput Optimized HDD (st1) volumes (supported)
- Cold HDD (sc1) volumes (not supported due to poor performance)
- Magnetic (standard) volumes (supported, but use st1 instead where possible)

Installing AMI on AWS EC2

The following two methods can be used to install/deploy Continuous Compliance in AWS:

Access Delphix provided AMI through the Delphix download site
Subscribe to Continuous Compliance through the Amazon Marketplace

Using the Delphix download site to deploy masking

On the Delphix download site, click the AMI you would like to share and accept the Delphix License agreement. Alternatively, follow a link given by your Delphix solutions architect.
On the Amazon Web Services AccountDetails form presented:
1. Enter your AWS Account Identifier, which can be found here: https://console.aws.amazon.com/billing/home?#/account. If you want to use the GovCloud AWS Region, be sure to enter the ID for the AWS Account which has GovCloud enabled.
2. Select which AWS Region you would like the AMI to be shared in. If you would like the AMI shared in a different region, contact your Delphix account representative to make the proper arrangements.
Click Share. The Delphix Engine will appear in your list of AMIs in AWS momentarily.
Reference the Installation and Configuration Requirements for AWS/EC2 when deploying the AMI.
Once you have launched your Continuous Compliance EC2 instance and it is accessible via a web browser (port 80), proceed to First time setup to configure the system.

Subscribing to Continuous Compliance through the Amazon Marketplace

Sign in to the AWS Console.
Navigate to AWS Marketplace.
Typing Delphix in the search bar will find several Delphix Product offerings. Select Continuous Compliance for AWS (3TB).
Click Continue to Subscribe.
Click Accept Terms.
Wait for the subscription to be confirmed, then click Continue to Configuration.
Select or verify the correct Region for launch/deployment.
Then click Continue to Launch.
Select either to Launch from Website or Launch through EC2.
For either option you will need to enter the following:
1. VPC in which to launch the instance.
2. Subnet on which the instance will reside.
3. Instance Type (Recommended: r4.2xlarge).
4. Security Group (Minimal access required: 22, 80, or 443)
Once the Delphix EC2 instance is launched proceed to Setting up the Delphix Engine to configure the system.