Overview of support for Amazon Web Services

EC2 instance

Amazon EC2 (Elastic Cloud Computing) instances are similar to virtual servers that can run applications. Instances are created from an Amazon AMI.

Amazon Machine Image (AMI)

A template that contains a software configuration, including an operating system, which defines your operating environment. You can use generic public AMIs or you can customize a public AMI.

Availability Zone

A distinct location within an AWS geographic Region. A Region can contain multiple Availability Zones. An Availability Zone is designed to be isolated so that a failure in another Availability Zone does not impact its instances. A subnet resides in only one Availability Zone.

The BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management pod is mapped to an Availability Zone. Consequently, Availability Zones are onboarded as pods.

Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)

A virtual network dedicated to your AWS account that is logically isolated from other virtual networks in the AWS cloud. A VPC creates a separate section of the AWS cloud with its own virtual network topology. You can create multiple VPCs in the AWS cloud.

A VPC is contained with an AWS geographic Region, and it can span multiple Availability Zones.

Logical hosting environment (LHE)

A generic BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management construct. In the AWS context, a LHE can be either a VPC or an Availability Zone.

Security Group

A firewall policy that is applied to provisioned virtual machines. A security group consist of rules that control inbound and outbound network traffic. You can assign virtual machine instances to multiple security groups.

SSH key pair

A public/private key pair that enables remote access to your virtual machine instances. Use this key to gain SSH access to Linux instances and Remote Desktop access to Windows instances.

BMC Server Automation Agent

A software package that you can install on an AMI instance to enable the BMC Server Automation use cases on virtual machine instances.

Logical data center

A generic construct that absorbs the key artifacts of any isolated network topology.

The logical data center references Logical Distributed Firewalls, Logical Perimeter Firewalls, Logical Data Stores, and Logical Load Balancers.

Logical load balancer

A Logical Load Balancer represents an Elastic Load Balancer. The Logical Load Balancer has IPV4 and IPV6 DNS names to accomodate IPV6 clients. The cloud administrator has the ability to decide the probing protocol and the probing path. For example, a webserver instance listening to traffic on port 80 would have a probing path similar to xxxxx:80/index.html.

Logical perimeter firewall

A construct within the Logical Data Center that provides security at the perimeter of the data center, even though the physical layout is not exposed. Packets coming in from the internet must traverse
through these firewalls before they can enter the Logical Data Center. These firewalls typically provide subnet level security.

Logical distributed firewall

A construct within the Logical Data Center that provides security between VLANs. These firewalls are additive to the logical perimeter firewalls and
are usually tightly integrated at the hypervisor layer. These firewalls can be associated with elastic load balancers.

Logical data store

A construct within the Logical Data Center that provides a virtual data store.

Availability Zone

Logical Hosting Environment

Virtual Private Cloud

Logical Hosting Environment

Amazon Machine Image

Template for a provisioning instance

Virtual Private Cloud subnet

Logical Network

Elastic Load Balancers

Logical Load Balancers

Security Groups

Logical Distributed Firewalls

Network ACL

Logical Perimeter Firewalls

Elastic Block Storage

Logical Datastore

m1.small 

64-bit 

1

1741

1

1.7

1x160 

Low

-

m1.medium 

64-bit 

1

3840

2

3.75

1 x 410 

-

Moderate

m1.large 

64-bit 

2

7680

4

7.5

2x420 

Yes

Moderate

m1.xlarge 

64-bit 

4

15360

8

15

4x420 

Yes

High

m3.xlarge 

64-bit

4

15360

13

15

2x40
SSD*6

Yes

High

m3.2xlarge 

64-bit

8

30720    

26

30

2x80
SSD*6

Yes

High

c1.medium 

64-bit

2

1741

5

1.7

1x350

-

Moderate

c1.xlarge 

64-bit

8

7168

20

7

4x420

Yes

High

cc1.4xlarge         

64-bit

16

23040

33.5

22.5

2x840

-

10
Gigabit4

cc2.8xlarge 

64-bit

32

61952

88

60.5

4x840 

-

10
Gigabit4

cg1.4xlarge

64-bit

16

23040

33.5

22.5

2x840 

-

10
Gigabit4

m2.xlarge

64-bit

2

17510

6.5

17.1

1x420 

-

Moderate

m2.2xlarge 

64-bit

4

35021

13

34.2

1x850 

Yes

Moderate

m2.4xlarge

64-bit

8

70042

26

68.4

2x840 

Yes

High

cr1.8xlarge          

64-bit

32

249856  

88

244

2x120
SSD

-

10
Gigabit4

hi1.4xlarge

64-bit

16

61952

35

60.5

2x1024
SSD2 

-

10
Gigabit4

hs1.8xlarge         

64-bit

16

119808  

35

117

24 x
2,048
x 3

-

10
Gigabit4

t1.micro 

64-bit

1

630

Variable5 

0.615

EBS only 

-

Very
low

Onboarded Availability Zones

Load Balancer and Firewall management is not supported for Availability Zone-based LDCs.

VPCs (onboarded or created)

The BMC Cloud Management console does not support LHE Offboard. Therefore, all of the VPC-based LHEs are deleted from both the Cloud database and AWS when you select Decommission in the BMC Cloud Management console, including the onboarded VPC-based LHEs where the VPCs were created in AWS.

LHE Offboard is supported only using the API.

Firewall Rules / Network Paths

• Firewalls: Outbound rules for Distributed Firewall cannot be viewed or created through the Firewall management UI. To view an outbound firewall rule, use the API.
• Network paths: The Create: Deny Network Paths are only valid between two networks (external or internal). If an endpoint is a Resource Set, the Network Path is invalid.
• Firewall and network paths: 
  • The only valid protocols for firewall rules and network paths are TCP or UDP.
  • If you have multiple network paths, deleting a network path or SOI with a shared firewall rule deletes the rule. This may result in failures for other SOIs that also use the shared firewall rule. In the even of failure, you must recreate the network path to re-instantiate the firewall rule.  

 Scaling

Scaling up (adding CPU or memory) or scaling down an Amazon EC2 node is tied to the source instance family, as defined by the AWS SDK version 1.6.2. However, if the source instance is a micro instance, a scale up operation could allow an EC2 node to cross the instance type family boundary from micro to general purpose. Scale down operations are strictly within instance family.