This post will cover the basics for settings up integration with Amazon Virtual Tape Library with AWS/Glacier as target

Microsoft have a competing solution that integrations Azure into the Data Protection Manager Console , that have been covered in earlier post and will be covered more in a post where the two solutions is being compared

Amazon Virtual Tape library is a low cost highly flexible solution and below if their own description of the device

Gateway-Virtual Tape Library (Gateway-VTL): With Gateway-VTL you can have a limitless collection of virtual tapes. Each virtual tape can be stored in a Virtual Tape Library backed by Amazon S3 or a Virtual Tape Shelf backed by Amazon Glacier. The Virtual Tape Library exposes an industry standard iSCSI interface which provides your backup application with on-line access to the virtual tapes. When you no longer require immediate or frequent access to data contained on a virtual tape, you can use your backup application to move it from its Virtual Tape Library to your Virtual Tape Shelf in order to further reduce your storage costs.

Pricing is difference from each region , and long term storage cost is alot cheaper than “near” online storage.

So its time to grab a excel jedi and calculate the cost vs Azure vs Tape

Amazon have a very good guide to setup a new gateway , suppport requirement for Hyper-V is right now 2008 R2 , this test is on 2012 R2 so unsupported and not usable for production until Amazon gets the VTL upgraded.

The gateway have 3 modes , this post will cover the Virtual Tape Library mode and not the other operations.

Supported Hypervisors and Host Requirements

You may choose to run AWS Storage Gateway either on-premises, as a virtual machine appliance, or in AWS, as an Amazon EC2 instance.

AWS Storage Gateway supports the following hosts for deployment on your premises:

VMware ESXi Hypervisor (version 4.1 or 5.0). A free version of VMware is available on the VMware website. You will also need a VMware vSphere client to connect to the host.

Microsoft Hyper-V 2008 R2. A free, standalone version of Hyper-V is available at the Microsoft Download Center. You will need a Microsoft Hyper-V Manager on a Windows client computer to connect to the host.

Supported Backup Software (Gateway-VTL Only)

Typically, you will use a backup application to read, write, and manage tapes with a gateway-VTL.

The following lists the third-party backup software that Gateway-VTL supports.

Microsoft System Center 2012 R2 Data Protection Manager

I want to run the AWS Storage Gateway on Microsoft Hyper-V

Download the AWS Storage Gateway Virtual Machine (VM) software. Unzip the downloaded file and make note of the location of the folder that was created.

Using Microsoft Hyper-V Manager client, connect to the host hypervisor that you will be using to run the AWS Storage Gateway.

Since we cant use the template out of the box we create a new machine

Select name and location

and Generation 1

for testing purpose i set the vm to 8gb of memory and 4 cpu’s

And added a nic , this test uses one nic both for iscsi to the VTL and to transfer to the internet this can be seperated

Use the VHD supplied from the image from Amazon

Your gateway prepares and buffers your application data for upload to AWS by temporarily storing this data on disks referred to as upload buffer.

Using your Hyper-V Manager client, allocate one or more local disks to your gateway VM for your gateway’s upload buffer. To estimate the amount of upload buffer your gateway requires, use the approximate data you plan to virtual tape cartridges on a daily basis. It is strongly recommended that you allocate at least 150 GBs of upload buffer. You can refer to our documentation for a more precise calculation.

for testing i added a small workload so we didnt need large cache files locally

So 2 files og 256GB was added to the VM

time to power on the VM

hit 2 Static Ip Address

add the ip address on the gateway activation

Select the Medium Changer STK-L700 for Data Protection Manager Support

Its time to create some virtual tapes

First step is to setup the Upload and Cache on the 2 drives created on the VM

100GB tapes with a prefix for TEST

And we now have a virtual tape libray and LTO drives

On the DPM server connect through ISCSI to the VTL VM

Connect the 10 drives and the media changer

In device manager update the unknow media changer to Sonly A500C

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/storagegateway/latest/userguide/backup-DPM.html

in DPM hit Rescan under Library

You will see the Libray and 10 stand alone drives

Hit “Add Tape” to impor the virtual tapes

net stop DPMLA

The DPMLA service is stopping..
The DPMLA service was stopped successfully.

STOP the loader service

C:\Program Files\Microsoft System Center 2012 R2\DPM\DPM\bin>DPMDriveMappingTool

.exe
Performing Device Inventory …
Mapping Drives to Library …
Adding Standalone Drives …
Writing the Map File …
Drive Mapping Completed Successfully.

Run the DPMDriveMappingTool

C:\Program Files\Microsoft System Center 2012 R2\DPM\DPM\bin>net start dpmla

Start the Loader service

The DPMLA service was started successfully.

C:\Program Files\Microsoft System Center 2012 R2\DPM\DPM\bin>

Rescan the library again

And you should see a loader with 1600 slos and 10 drives

Run a detailed inventory, note since its 1600 slots its takes 10-15 minutes on my test machine

And we now have something to backup to

Modify the protection group to add Long Term Storage

Select a fitting schedule

For testing i only uses one drive and compression not encryption , security will be convered in a future post

Create Recovery Point

And select long term recovery

and we know have backup to cloud instead of local tape drive.

Next post will cover more detailed monitoring of cache/buffer and tape handling in Amazon