AWS Storage Gateway connects an on-premises software appliance with cloud-based storage. Macrium Site Manager can connect to a Volume Gateway via a iSCSI device mapped as a network share.
Creating Your Gateway
This section describes the steps to create a AWS Gateway that can be used as a Site Manager repository.
After logging on to AWS, you will need to access the AWS Storage Gateway dashboard:
Click the 'Create gateway' button to start the create gateway wizard:
In this example, we are creating a volume gateway with cached volumes:
Amazon provides a virtual machine that will host the gateway. This is downloaded and added to your VM provider. In this example, we are using Microsoft Hyper-V 2012
Configuring the Gateway VM
Once the VM image is downloaded, extract the contents of the zip file to disk and run the Hyper-V Manager to import the VM image.
Specify the location where the zip file was extracted:
Select 'AWS-Storage-Gateway'.
Create a copy of the VM to create a new unique ID for the VM.
Specify the location where you want to save the VM.
Specify the location where you want to save the VM hard disks.
Ensure that you specify a network switch that is visible to the internet.
Click 'Finish' to complete the VM creation process.
Once the VM is created two new virtual hard drives are required for the Volume Gateway. Edit the settings for the new VM and create two new hard drives.
Create the hard drives on the SCSI Controller.
Click 'Next' to continue.
Specify the 'VHDX' format for the disks.
In this example, the disks will dynamically use physical disk space.
Specify location for the virtual disks.
Specify the size of the virtual hard disk.
Click 'Finish' to create the hard disk. Repeat this process to create the second disk.
Once the VM is configured, the creation of the gateway can continue by providing the IP address of the VM:
Specify the timezone for the gateway and provide a name:
Once the gateway is activated, we need to specify which disk is the "Upload buffer", and which is the local "Cache":
Once the settings are saved, the gateway will be fully created:
Create a Volume
Once the gateway is created, we need to add a volume to the gateway by clicking 'Create volume' button. After selecting the gateway, and specifying the capacity, click the 'Create volume' button:
The volume can optionally be authenticated using CHAP, or saved for immediate use:
Once you have created a volume on the gateway, you can set up a network share for the volume on the VM and create an Amazon AWS Storage Gateway repository within Site Manager.
To automatically connect a UNC share to an S3 volume, a tag has to be created for the S3 volume.
This tag must have a key equal to "Macrium_NetworkShare" and back slashes must be replaced with forward slashes.
Creating an iSCSI Initialtor
Launch the iSCSI control panel (iscsicpl.exe) from the Windows Start menu.
If the iSCSI service is not running you will be prompted to start the service.
Click on the 'Discovery' tab to locate the iSCSI targets.
Specify the IP address of the VM.
Switch back to the 'Targets' tab, and click 'Quick Connect'. Connect to the iSCSI volume, then click 'Done'. the iSCSI will now create an iSCSI reference to the Volume gateway volumes and will be visible to the Windows client.
After you have connected to the iSCSI volume, run 'diskmgmt.msc'. When Disk Management starts it detects the iSCSI disk and prompts you to initialize it.
Once the disk is initialized, it can be formatted and assigned a driver letter and shared across the network as a UNC share.