Virtual Machine Requirements for AWS EC2 Platform

Large Memory Instances (preferred)

• r4.2xlarge
• r4.4xlarge
• r4.8xlarge
• r3.2xlarge
• r3.4xlarge

• r3.8xlarge

High I/O Instances (supported)

• i3.2xlarge
• i3.4xlarge
• i3.8xlarge

• The Delphix Engine most closely resembles a storage appliance and performs best when provisioned using a storage-optimized instance type
• Larger instance types provide more CPU, which can prevent resource shortfalls under high I/O throughput conditions
• Larger instances also provide more memory, which the Delphix Engine uses to cache database blocks. More memory will provide better read performance.

• Virtual Private Cloud
• Static Public IP
• Security Group Configuration

• You must deploy the Delphix Engine and all of the source and target environments in a VPC network to ensure that private IP addresses are static and do not change when you restart instances.
• When adding environments to the Delphix Engine, you must use the host's VPC (static private) IP addresses.
• The EC2 Delphix instance must be launched with a static IP address; however, the default behavior for VPC instances is to launch with a dynamic public IP address – which can change whenever you restart the instance. If you're using a public IP address for your Delphix Engine, static IP addresses can only be achieved by using assigned AWS Elastic IP Addresses.
• The default security group will only open port 22 for secure shell (SSH) access. You must modify the security group to allow access to all of the networking ports used by the Delphix Engine and the various source and target engines. See General Network and Connectivity Requirements for information about specific port configurations.
• See Network Performance Configuration Options for information about network performance tuning

• EBS Provisioned IOPS Volumes

• All attached storage devices must be EBS volumes. Delphix does not support the use of instance store volumes.
• Because EBS volumes are connected to EC2 instances via the network, other network activity on the instance can affect throughput to EBS volumes. EBS optimized instances provide guaranteed throughput to EBS volumes and are required (for instance types that support it) in order to provide consistent and predictable storage performance. The i2.8xlarge instance type does not support EBS optimized instances; however, this instance type supports 10 Gigabit networking that often provides suitable performance.
• Use EBS volumes with provisioned IOPs in order to provide consistent and predictable performance.
  The number of provisioned IOPs depend on the estimated IO workload on the Delphix Engine. Provisioned IOPs volumes must be configured with a volume size at least 30 GiB times the number of provisioned IOPs. For example, for a provisioned volume of 3000 IOPs, you would need at least 100 GiB since the volume required is at least thirty times the provisioned IOP (100 x 30).
  
• I/O requests of up to 256 kilobytes (KB) are counted as a single I/O operation (IOP) for provisioned IOPs volumes. Each volume can be configured for up to 4,000 IOPs.

• Allocate initial storage equal to the size of the physical source databases. For high redo rates and/or high DB change rates, allocate an additional 10-20% storage.
• Add storage when storage capacity approaches 30% free
• Keep all EBS volumes the same size. Add new storage by provisioning new volumes of the same size.
• Maximize Delphix Engine RAM for a larger system cache to service reads
• Use at least 4 EBS volumes to maximize performance. This enables the Delphix File System (DxFS) to make sure that its file systems are always consistent on disk without additional serialization. This also enables the Delphix Engine to achieve higher I/O rates by queueing more I/O operations to its storage.