When deploying an AltaVault AMI instance, you should follow the best practices regarding security group, key pair, placement group, and network settings. Doing so helps to in delivering optimal performance from the appliance.
Best practices for deploying AMI instances
- Security Group
- For general disaster recovery purposes, it is recommended that you deploy the AltaVault AMI in a different region within Amazon than where your physical or virtual production environment resides. However, if your production environment is cloud based in Amazon EC2, then your AltaVault AMI could be located in the same region and placement group.
It is recommended that you place the AltaVault AMI instance in the same media group as the backup or media server virtual machines so that the virtual machines can communicate with the AltaVault AMI instance.
- Key Pair
- The key pair is used to authenticate the AltaVault AMI instance. Creating a key pair is a requirement before deploying an AltaVault AMI instance.
- Placement Group
- Both the AVA-c16 and the backup application instance should be in the same placement group to take advantage of using the 10 GbE infrastructure for communications.
- MTU
- It is recommended that you set the MTU size to 9000 to optimize the network interface performance with AltaVault. Although an MTU size of 9000 is not supported by all environments, it is supported by AWS. It is important that both the AltaVault appliance and client MTU sizes match. The AWS documentation contains more information.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) Documentation: Network Maximum Transmission Unit (MTU) for Your EC2 Instance
Best practices for connecting an AMI instance to the network
- Elastic IP address
- Optionally, to connect to the AltaVault AMI instance without having to first refer to the AWS dashboard, you can associate the AltaVault instance with an Elastic IP address.
- Static IP address
- Do not attempt to set a static IP address using the AltaVault UI. This can cause the appliance to become unreachable by EC2, and result in a redeployment and recovery of the AltaVault AMI instance.