AWS Storage Gateway User Guide
Optimizing Gateway Performance
Optimizing Gateway Performance
You can find information following about how to optimize the performance of your gateway. The
guidance is based on adding resources to your gateway and adding resources to your application server.
Add Resources to Your Gateway
You can optimize gateway performance by adding resources to your gateway in one or more of the
following ways.
Use higher-performance disks
To optimize gateway performance, you can add high-performance disks such as solid-state drives
(SSDs) and a NVMe controller. You can also attach virtual disks to your VM directly from a storage
area network (SAN) instead of the Microsoft Hyper-V NTFS. Improved disk performance generally
results in better throughput and more input/output operations per second (IOPS). To measure
throughput, use the
ReadBytes
and
WriteBytes
metrics with the
Samples
Amazon CloudWatch
statistic. For example, the
Samples
statistic of the
ReadBytes
metric over a sample period of
5 minutes divided by 300 seconds gives you the IOPS. As a general rule, when you review these
metrics for a gateway, look for low throughput and low IOPS trends to indicate disk-related
bottlenecks. For more information about gateway metrics, see
Your Tape Gateway and AWS (p. 213)
.
Note
CloudWatch metrics are not available for all gateways. For information about gateway
Monitoring Your Gateway and Resources (p. 185)
Add CPU resources to your gateway host
The minimum requirement for a gateway host server is four virtual processors. To optimize gateway
performance, confirm that the four virtual processors that are assigned to the gateway VM are
backed by four cores. In addition, confirm that you are not oversubscribing the CPUs of the host
server. When you add additional CPUs to your gateway host server, you increase the processing
capability of the gateway. Doing this allows your gateway to deal with, in parallel, both storing data
from your application to your local storage and uploading this data to Amazon S3. Additional CPUs
also help ensure that your gateway gets enough CPU resources when the host is shared with other
VMs. Providing enough CPU resources has the general effect of improving throughput.
AWS Storage Gateway supports using 24 CPUs in your gateway host server. You can use 24 CPUs
to significantly improve the performance of your gateway. We recommend the following gateway
configuration for your gateway host server:
• 24 CPUs.
• 16 GiB of reserved RAM.
• Disk 1 attached to paravirtual controller 1, to be used as the gateway cache as follows:
• SSD using an NVMe controller.
• Disk 2 attached to paravirtual controller 1, to be used as the gateway upload buffer as follows:
• SSD using an NVMe controller.
• Disk 3 attached to paravirtual controller 2, to be used as the gateway upload buffer as follows:
• SSD using an NVMe controller.
• Network adapter 1 configured on VM network 1:
• Use VM network 1 and add VMXnet3 (10 Gbps) to be used for ingestion.
• Network adapter 2 configured on VM network 2:
• Use VM network 2 and add a VMXnet3 (10 Gbps) to be used to connect to AWS.
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