Online Backup Service On Amazon

Online Backup Guide for the Amazon Cloud: How to Setup your Online Backup Service using Vembu StoreGrid ‘Backup Virtual Appliance’ on the Amazon Cloud Here is a step-by-step set of instructions to get your online backup service running on the Amazon Cloud using StoreGrid online backup software.

Tech Essentials: What is Amazon EC2?

Amazon’s Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) is a service that provides scalable, hosted virtual servers running on Amazon’s data centers.

What is Amazon S3?

Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) is an online storage service that offers scalable storage on Amazon’s data centers.

What is an Amazon Machine Image - AMI?

An Amazon Machine Image (AMI) is a ‘virtual appliance’ available for use in Amazon’s data center. Using web service interfaces, you can launch instances with a variety of operating systems.

What is StoreGrid Cloud AMI?

StoreGrid Cloud AMI is the complete ‘virtual appliance’ that is already uploaded on Amazon EC2 pre-installed (and pre-configured) with StoreGrid. You can simply launch an instance of StoreGrid Cloud AMI and get your backup / replication servers running on the Amazon Cloud.

How does StoreGrid Service Provider Edition work with Amazon?

StoreGrid Service Provider Edition clients are installed in your client machines that require to be backed up and you can power up your StoreGrid Servers on the Amazon EC2 to receive the client’s backups. The backup data will be stored on Amazon’s S3 storage service (please note that the StoreGrid backup server will use an Amazon EBS volume during the backup process).

How much will this entire setup cost?

Amazon charges fees for the ‘server’ usage time, data transfer and storage charges on S3 etc. For more information please visit http://www.vembu.com/storegrid/amazon-aws-pricing.php StoreGrid licenses cost $30 per desktops and $60 per servers – For more information on volume discounts, please visit http://www.vembu.com/storegrid/partner-form.php

How will I manage my backups?

Simply login to your StoreGrid server web console running on Amazon using your public DNS address and login. You will be able to manage the backups from all your clients using StoreGrid’s powerful management features.

I need more information. Where can I find it?

This guide provides you with the steps required to setup an online backup appliance on the Amazon Cloud using StoreGrid Cloud AMI. If you require further information, please visit http://www.vembu.com/storegrid/amazon-cloud-backup.php For more information on Amazon EC2 / S3, please visit http://aws.amazon.com. Our Cloud Technical Support team is available at [email protected]

Installation Steps in a Nutshell 1

Get your Amazon AWS account

2

Launch the StoreGrid ‘Virtual Appliance’ on Amazon • Using AWS Management Console • (Or) Using ElasticFox • (Or) Using Amazon Command Line tools

3

Configure your StoreGrid ‘Virtual Appliance’ server settings

4

Get your clients machines to backup to your Amazon Server!

1

Getting your Amazon AWS account

1) Point your browser to http://aws.amazon.com and click on the button ‘Sign Up Now’

2) Enter your Amazon account details, if you have one (or select ‘I am a new user’)

3) Enter your name and email address to register for an Amazon Web Services Account and click ‘Continue’

4) Please enter your contact information and accept the AWS Customer Agreement

5) You will see this screen below if you have successfully created your AWS account.

6) Login into Amazon Web Services and select Your Account
Access Identifiers from the top menu. Note down your Amazon AWS account number from the top-right corner.

7) You will see the ‘Access Key ID’ and your ‘Secret Access Key’ listed below. Please note them down for future use.

To proceed with the next steps, you can use AWS Management Console, ElasticFox or Amazon Command Line tools; in this guide, we will proceed with the ElasticFox tool to manage your Amazon Cloud instances. What is ElasticFox? Where do I get it?

How do I use it?

ElasticFox is a Mozilla Firefox extension for managing your Amazon EC2 account. You can launch new instances, mount volumes and more. You can download it from here – http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/entry.jspa?ext ernalID=609 You need Firefox browser to be able to ElasticFox extension You can get the latest version of Firefox from here – http://www.mozilla.com/firefox

2

Launching the StoreGrid Virtual Appliance on Amazon EC2

1) Once you install ElasticFox, you will see this screen when you select Tools
ElasticFox in your Mozilla Firefox browser.

2) In ElasticFox, Click on the ‘Account IDs’ button. And enter your ‘Account Id’ and give it a ‘Display Name’ and click ‘Add’.

3) Once you have created your Account Id, Click on ‘Credentials’ and enter the ‘Display Name’ from the previous step for the field ‘Account Name’ and enter your ‘AWS Access Key’ and ‘AWS Secret Access Key’ from step (7) above.

4) Select the region in which you want the Amazon Instances on EC2 to be located. Here we have chosen ‘us-east-1’

5) Click on the ‘KeyPairs’ tab in ElasticFox and click on the green button to create a new Key Pair for your ‘virtual appliance’. Give it a name to identify it. E.g. ABC_BackupServer

6) Once you click ‘OK’, you will get the following screen to save the private key for your ‘virtual appliance’. Choose a location and click ‘Save’

7) You will get the KeyPair for your ‘virtual appliance’ ABC_BackupServer listed in the KeyPairs tab in ElasticFox

8) Now to get your own StoreGrid ‘Virtual Appliance’ started, Click on the ‘Images’ Tab and select the StoreGrid Cloud AMI id that you wish to startup. Simply select ‘AMIs’ in the drop down menu and enter the StoreGrid Cloud AMI ID (listed below) in the text box in the ‘Images’ tab. You can choose from the following StoreGrid Cloud AMIs for the US Region Vembu StoreGrid Cloud AMI ID for Windows [32 bit]: ami-f232d59b Vembu StoreGrid Cloud AMI ID for Windows [64 bit]: ami-f93fd890 Vembu StoreGrid Cloud AMI ID for Cent OS [32 bit]: ami-01b75668 StoreGrid Cloud AMIs for the EU Region Vembu StoreGrid Cloud AMI ID for Windows [32 bit]: ami-2ee3cb5a Vembu StoreGrid Cloud AMI ID for Windows [64 bit]: ami-36e3cb42 Vembu StoreGrid Cloud AMI ID for Cent OS [32 bit]: ami-afb29adb

(Note: The steps detailed below are applicable for a Windows instance of the StoreGrid Cloud AMI; for instructions on setting up a Linux instance, please refer http://www.vembu.com/storegrid/amazon-ec2-s3-cloud-online-backup.php. You can get in touch with us at [email protected] in case of queries.)

9) Select the StoreGrid Cloud AMI listed in the screen and right click and say ‘Launch instance of this AMI’

10) In the following screen, select the type of instance (e.g. m1.small), number of instance (e.g. 1), select the Key Pair that you have created in the previous step (e.g. ABC_BackupServer). Then select the availability zone for the instance e.g. (US-East1a). Then Click ‘Launch’. (Note: It will take a few minutes for AWS to launch an instance. Please wait till the ‘State’ status in the ‘Instances’ tab in ElasticFox comes to ‘running’)

Congratulations! now you have your own ‘backup virtual appliance’ running on the Amazon Cloud. You will see a screen like this below.

11) You will require an EBS volume along with your backup virtual appliance to run StoreGrid backups. For this, go to ElasticFox and click on the ‘Volumes and Snapshots’ Tab. Click on the ‘+’ button to create a new volume What is an EBS volume?

EBS is short for Elastic Block Store. Amazon EBS volumes are storage that persists independently of your backup virtual appliance. Amazon Elastic Block Store provides storage volumes that can be attached to a running Amazon EC2 instance (like your ABC_BackupServer backup appliance) and be viewed as a device within the instance.

12) Enter the size of the EBS Volume and the Availability Zone in which you require it. Enter the ‘Instance ID’ (available in the ‘Instances’ Tab in ElasticFox) of your backup virtual appliance for the ‘Tag’ (Note: The availability zone of the EBS volume should be the same as the availability zone of your EC2 instance that you started up in Step #10 above)

3

Configure your StoreGrid ‘Virtual Appliance’ server settings

1) To login to your EC2 instance, you will have to grant permission to Remote Desktop (RDP) connections to your backup server. To do this, click on ‘Security Groups’ tab in ElasticFox and click on the ‘Grant New Permission’ button (marked with green). Select ‘RDP’ under Protocol Details and click ‘Add’.

2) Right click on the instance of your ‘backup virtual appliance’ under the ‘Instances’ tab and select ‘Get Administrator Password’

3) You will get a message like the one below.

4) Now, to login into your ‘backup virtual appliance’, right click the instance again and select ‘View Details’. You will see a screen like the one below. Copy the ‘Public DNS Name’ field from the window that appears. You can login to your backup virtual appliance using remote desktop using this Public DNS Name.

5) If you are performing these steps from a Windows installation, use Remote Desktop Connection, (Start -> Programs -> Accessories -> Communications -> Remote Desktop Connection) to login to your EC2 instance (or) In case you are on a Linux machine, use rdesktop to login using the public-DNS name of the EC2 instance and the administrator password.

6) Once you are connected to your EC2 instance, convert the EBS volume attached to the EC2 instance into a new partition using the New Partition Wizard on Windows

Once you complete the wizard, you will find the EBS volume listed in the EC2 instance like the figure below.

7) In the EBS volume (E:\ drive in our example), create a new folder called ‘SGCloudConf’. Within this folder, create a file called ‘SGConf.xml’ with the following text. This xml file stores the values of StoreGrid Configuration and EBS Volume snapshot schedule. <StoreGrid> <EBSSnapShots Enabled="1"> <Schedule Type="" Day="0" Hour="2" Mins="0" />

Attribute ID StartModule

Enabled

Schedule

Volume ID

Description The ID attribute under Configuration tag represents the unique StoreGrid ID of the StoreGrid installation. The StartModule attribute specifies that the StoreGrid instance to be started as 601 - Backup Server or 609 - Replication Server To know more about StoreGrid Backup and Replication servers, please visit https://support.vembu.com/index.php?_m=knowledgebase&_a=view article&kbarticleid=54 The Enabled attribute under EBSSnapShots tag represents the enable 1 and disable - 0 of scheduled snapshots of the attached EBS Volume. It is recommended to have this value enabled, as this would make sure that there is a backup of the attached EBS Volume. The Schedule tag fills in the details for when to schedule the EBS Volume snapshot. For example, if you wish to do snapshot of the EBS volume daily on 2:10 AM, then you can configure as follows : <Schedule Type="Daily" Day="0" Hour="2" Mins="10" /> The Volume tag's ID attribute provides the EBS Volume's id value for taking the snapshot.

8) Next, to store the backup data, we will require a ‘bucket’ of storage in the Amazon S3 service. We will use the S3Fox tool to create the storage bucket on Amazon S3. What is S3Fox?

Where do I download this tool?

S3Fox Organizer is a simple tool that lets you organize/manage/store your files on Amazon S3. It is integrated into the Firefox browser. You can download this as a Firefox Add-on at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3247 You can get the latest version of Firefox from here – http://www.mozilla.com/firefox

After installing S3Fox Organizer, click on ‘Manage Accounts’ and add your AWS access credentials as below.

Click on the ‘Create Directory’ button to create a new S3 folder (or ‘bucket’). (Note: Folder (i.e. bucket) names can only contain lowercase letters, numbers, periods (.) and dashes (-). ) Then close the S3Fox tool and come back to the ElasticFox screen.

9) Under the same folder in the Amazon EC2 instance, ‘SGCloudConf’, create another file called ‘S3Conf.xml’ with the following text. This xml file stores the AWS access credentials needed for StoreGrid to store the primary storage data in Amazon S3.

<StoreGrid> <S3Configuration AccessKey="" SecretKey="" BucketName="<Bucket Name>" /> Attribute AccessKey SecretKey BucketName

Description AccessKey attribute stores the AWS access key. SecretKey attribute stores the AWS secret key. Enter the name of the folder (or ‘bucket’) we created using the S3Fox tool in the previous step.

10) To allow StoreGrid clients to connect to the StoreGrid Backup Server, you need to grant permission to the security group (e.g'default' security group) which determines the ports opened up for communication in your EC2 instance. The TCP ports for which the permission should be granted are 32004, 32007. For accessing StoreGrid web console remotely, you should open up 6060 and 6061 TCP Ports.

To do this, click on the ‘Security Groups’ tab in ElasticFox and click on the ‘Grant Permission’ button under Group Permissions.

11) In the ‘Grant New Permission’ pop-up, select ‘Other’ under Protocol Details and enter the Port Range as 32004 to 32004. Repeat this process for the ports 32007, 6060 and 6061. Port Number 32004 32007 6060 6061

Description For default Backup Port For default SSL Backup Port For default HTTP Port of StoreGrid WebConsole For default HTTPS Port of StoreGrid WebConsole

Congratulations, Your StoreGrid Backup Server (or Replication Server, as set in StartModule attribute in Step# 7) is now configured! After StoreGrid is started, login to StoreGrid web console by entering with the username of "admin" and password "storevembu"

4

Get your clients machines to backup to your Amazon Server

1) Download and install the StoreGrid client builds from this link http://www.vembu.com/storegrid/amazon-ec2-s3-cloudonline-backup.php#4.0 For client installation instructions and help in configuring backups, please refer to the help documentation – Client Operating System Windows

Installation Steps

Linux

http://www.storegrid.net/docs/storegrid/linux-installation-guide-25-client-only.pdf

MacOS

http://www.storegrid.net/docs/storegrid/mac-installation-guide-25.pdf

http://www.storegrid.net/docs/storegrid/windows-installation-guide-25-client-only.pdf

In case you require any further assistance during installation, please write to us at [email protected]

Vembu Technologies powers the online backup and storage business of over 1300 Managed Service Providers, VARs and ISPs worldwide with its flagship brand StoreGrid © Vembu Technologies, 2009. All rights reserved. www.vembu.com