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NetBackup™ Snapshot Manager Install and Upgrade Guide

Last Published: 2023-03-31

Product(s): NetBackup & Alta Data Protection (10.2)

AWS plug-in configuration notes

The Amazon Web Services (AWS) plug-in lets you create, restore, and delete snapshots of the following assets in an Amazon cloud:

Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances
Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes
Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) instances
Aurora clusters

Note:

Before you configure the AWS plug-in, make sure that you have configured the proper permissions so NetBackup Snapshot Manager can work with your AWS assets.

NetBackup Snapshot Manager supports the following AWS regions:

Table: AWS regions supported by NetBackup Snapshot Manager

AWS commercial regions	AWS GovCloud (US) regions
us-east-1, us-east-2, us-west-1, us-west-2 ap-east-1, ap-south-1, ap-northeast-1, ap-northeast-2, ap-southeast-1, ap-southeast-2, ap-southeast-3 eu-central-1, eu-west-1, eu-west-2, eu-west-3, eu-north-1, eu-south-1 Milan, eu-south-1 Cape Town cn-north-1, cn-northwest-1 ca-central-1 me-south-1 sa-east-1	us-gov-east-1 us-gov-west-1

The following information is required for configuring the NetBackup Snapshot Manager plug-in for AWS:

If NetBackup Snapshot Manager is deployed on a on-premise host or a virtual machine:

Table: AWS plug-in configuration parameters

NetBackup Snapshot Manager configuration parameter	AWS equivalent term and description
Access key	The access key ID, when specified with the secret access key, authorizes NetBackup Snapshot Manager to interact with the AWS APIs.
Secret key	The secret access key.
Regions	One or more AWS regions in which to discover cloud assets.

Note:

NetBackup Snapshot Manager encrypts credentials using AES-256 encryption.

If NetBackup Snapshot Manager is deployed in the AWS cloud:

Table: AWS plug-in configuration parameters: cloud deployment

NetBackup Snapshot Manager configuration parameter	Description
For Source Account configuration
Regions	One or more AWS regions associated with the AWS source account in which to discover cloud assets. Note: If you deploy NetBackup Snapshot Manager using the CloudFormation template (CFT), then the source account is automatically configured as part of the template-based deployment workflow.
For Cross Account configuration
Account ID	The account ID of the other AWS account (cross account) whose assets you wish to protect using the NetBackup Snapshot Manager instance configured in the Source Account.
Role Name	The IAM role that is attached to the other AWS account (cross account).
Regions	One or more AWS regions associated with the AWS cross account in which to discover cloud assets.

When NetBackup Snapshot Manager connects to AWS, it uses the following endpoints. You can use this information to create a allowed list on your firewall.

ec2.*.amazonaws.com
sts.amazonaws.com
rds.*.amazonaws.com
kms. *.amazonaws.com
ebs.*.amazonaws.com
iam.amazonaws.com
eks.*.amazonaws.com
autoscaling.*.amazonaws.com
(For DBPaaS protection) dynamodb.*.amazonaws.com

In addition, you must specify the following resources and actions:

ec2.SecurityGroup.*
ec2.Subnet.*
ec2.Vpc.*
ec2.createInstance
ec2.runInstances

Configuring multiple accounts or subscriptions or projects

If you are creating multiple configurations for the same plug-in, ensure that they manage assets from different Regions. Two or more plug-in configurations should not manage the same set of cloud assets simultaneously.
When multiple accounts are all managed with a single NetBackup Snapshot Manager, the number of assets being managed by a single NetBackup Snapshot Manager instance might get too large and it would be better to space them out.
To achieve application consistent snapshots, we would require agent/agentless network connections between the remote VM instance and NetBackup Snapshot Manager. This would require setting up cross account/subscription/project networking.

AWS plug-in considerations and limitations

Before you configure the plug-in, consider the following:

NetBackup Snapshot Manager does not support AWS Nitro-based instances that use EBS volumes that are exposed as non-volatile memory express (NVMe) devices.
To allow NetBackup Snapshot Manager to discover and protect AWS Nitro-based Windows instances that use NVMe EBS volumes, ensure that the AWS NVMe tool executable file, ebsnvme-id.exe, is present in any of the following locations on the AWS Windows instance:
To allow NetBackup Snapshot Manager to discover and protect Windows instances created from custom/community AMI.
- AWS NVMe drivers must be installed on custom or community AMIs. See this link.
- Install the ebsnvme-id.exe either in %PROGRAMDATA%\Amazon\Tools or %PROGRAMFILES%\Veritas\Cloudpoint
- Friendly device name must contain the substring "NVMe", or update in Windows registry for all NVMe backed devices.
  Registry path:
  Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001
  \Enum\SCSI\Disk&Ven_NVMe&Prod_Amazon_Elastic_B\
  Property Name: FriendlyName
  Value: NVMe Amazon Elastic B SCSI Disk Drive
You cannot delete automated snapshots of RDS instances and Aurora clusters through NetBackup Snapshot Manager.
The application consistency of AWS RDS applications depend on the behavior of AWS. (AWS suspends I/O while backing up the DB instance).
This is a limitation from AWS and is currently outside the scope of NetBackup Snapshot Manager.
All automated snapshot names start with the pattern rds:.
If you are configuring the plug-in to discover and protect AWS Nitro-based Windows instances that use NVMe EBS volumes, you must ensure that the AWS NVMe tool executable file, ebsnvme-id.exe, is present in any of the following locations on the AWS instance:
- %PROGRAMDATA%\Amazon\Tools
  This is the default location for most AWS instances.
- %PROGRAMFILES%\Veritas\Cloudpoint
  Manually download and copy the executable file to this location.
- System PATH environment variable
  Add or update the executable file path in the system's PATH environment variable.
If the NVMe tool is not present in one of the mentioned locations, NetBackup Snapshot Manager may fail to discover the file systems on such instances. You may see the following error in the logs:
"ebsnvme-id.exe" not found in expected paths!"
This is required for AWS Nitro-based Windows instances only. Also, if the instance is launched using the community AMI or custom AMI, you might need to install the tool manually.
NetBackup Snapshot Manager does not support cross-account replication for AWS RDS instances or clusters, if the snapshots are encrypted using the default RDS encryption key (aws/rds). You cannot share such encrypted snapshots between AWS accounts.
If you try to replicate such snapshots between AWS accounts, the operation fails with the following error:
```
Replication failed The source snapshot KMS key [<key>] does not exist, 
is not enabled or you do not have permissions to access it.
```
This is a limitation from AWS and is currently outside the scope of NetBackup Snapshot Manager.
If a region is removed from the AWS plug-in configuration, then all the discovered assets from that region are also removed from the NetBackup Snapshot Manager assets database. If there are any active snapshots that are associated with the assets that get removed, then you may not be able perform any operations on those snapshots.
Once you add that region back into the plug-in configuration, NetBackup Snapshot Manager discovers all the assets again and you can resume operations on the associated snapshots. However, you cannot perform restore operations on the associated snapshots.
NetBackup Snapshot Manager supports commercial as well as GovCloud (US) regions. During AWS plug-in configuration, even though you can select a combination of AWS commercial and GovCloud (US) regions, the configuration will eventually fail.
NetBackup Snapshot Manager does not support IPv6 addresses for AWS RDS instances. This is a limitation of Amazon RDS itself and is not related to NetBackup Snapshot Manager.
For more information, refer to the AWS documentation.
NetBackup Snapshot Manager does not support application consistent snapshots and granular file restores for Windows systems with virtual disks or storage spaces that are created from a storage pool. If a Microsoft SQL server snapshot job uses disks from a storage pool, the job fails with an error. But if a snapshot job for virtual machine which is in a connected state is triggered, the job might be successful. In this case, the file system quiescing and indexing is skipped. The restore job for such an individual disk to original location also fails. In this condition, the host might move to an unrecoverable state and requires a manual recovery.