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Deployment for AWS EC2

Overview

This article outlines the virtual machine requirements, including memory and data storage, for deploying the Delphix Engine on Amazon EC2 (Elastic Cloud Compute). Once the requirements listed on this page are reviewed, refer to the next articles in the AWS EC2 Deployment topic:

Delphix disk storage capabilities remain seamlessly operable. There are no additional limitations to your storage, unless otherwise imposed by the [respective] Hypervisor or Cloud environment.

Instance types

The following is a list of instance types that are supported to deploy Delphix on AWS EC2. Delphix periodically certifies new instance types, which will be added to the list here. 

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 or NVMe (No HDD)

Recommended instance families:

  • R4

  • R5n

  • R5b

  • R6in

  • R6idn

  • Larger instance types provide more CPU, which can prevent resource shortfalls under high I/O throughput conditions.

  • Larger instances also provide more memory, which Continuous Data uses to cache database blocks. More memory will provide better read performance.

  • Delphix Elastic Data Engines (engines backed by object storage) will need more bandwidth than traditional engines (backed by EBS) because the s3 bucket used to store data is accessed over a network pipe that is shared with other engines activity.

    Information on AWS instances

Network configuration

It is recommended to enable Enhanced Networking to maximize performance. For more information view Enhanced Networking on Linux. Note that the enhanced networking driver is included with Delphix software, and no steps need to be taken on the Delphix Engine to enable the feature other than rebooting.

Requirements

Notes

Virtual Private Cloud

The Delphix Engine and all of the source and target environments must be deployed in a VPC network to ensure that private IP addresses are static and do not change when restarting instances.

When adding environments to the Delphix Engine, 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 the instance restarts. If using a public IP address for the 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. The security group must be modified to allow access to all of the networking ports used by the Delphix Engine and the various source and target engines. 

See Network Performance Configuration Options for information about network performance tuning.

See General Network and Connectivity Requirements for information about specific port configurations.

EBS configuration

Deploying Delphix on AWS EC2 requires EBS volumes. Since EBS volumes are connected to EC2 instances via the network, other network activity on the instance can affect throughput to EBS volumes. Delphix recommends EBS General Purpose SSD (GP2 and GP3) or Provisioned IOPS SSD volumes to provide consistent and predictable storage performance. For more information on EBS volumes, see the AWS documentation on the topic.

Recommendations

Notes

EBS Provisioned IOPS SSD Volumes
(Highly Recommended)

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.

EBS General Purpose SSD Volumes

Delphix supports GP2 and GP3 General Purpose SSDs. You can now migrate your Amazon EBS volumes from GP2 to GP3. For more details on migration, see this Amazon documentation on EBS Volumes Migration.

Delphix Elastic Data (Engines backed by s3 storage) need gp3 or higher.

General storage configuration

Requirements

Notes

General Storage Configuration

Delphix recommends using storage disks that in sum, have enough storage and IOPS/throughput for your data and performance requirements. Planning ahead for the use of multiple storage disks for the Delphix File System (DxFS) is recommended as it will facilitate growing and shrinking DxFS more easily in the future should your storage needs change. If using multiple storage disks for DxFS, Delphix recommends using equally sized storage disks. Please consult your cloud provider’s storage best practices for additional recommendations.

For Delphix Continuous Cloud Engines backed by s3 object storage, read the section Delphix Elastic Data Engines (Engines backed by object storage) in Initial Setup.
For Regular engines (backed by EBS):

  • Allocate initial storage equal to the size of the physical source database storage. For high redo rates and/or high DB change rates, allocate an additional 10-20 %.

  • All data storage volumes must be EBS volumes.

When adding additional disks to the block storage pool, storage device initialization will not occur since it is not required on this cloud.

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.

  • Cold HDD (sc1) volumes (not supported due to poor performance)

  • Using fast storage for EBS volumes is supported and recommended, including (in order of decreasing speed):

    • Provisioned IOPs SSD volumes (recommended) 

    • General Purpose SSD volumes (supported)

    • Throughput Optimized HDD (supported, not recommended due to performance)

  • Use of EBS volumes encrypted at creation is supported (during initial deployment from AMI, as well as storage devices added post-deployment), but can have negative performance consequences. Conversion of existing EBS volumes is possible in AWS but is not supported in Delphix at this time.

  • Cloud engines are only supported with IMDSV1 at this point in time.

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