RHEL6 compatibility with Nitro instances (DR scenario)

Question

Hi,
I'm working building a DR solution using Elastic Disaster Recovery to protect an on-premise server using Red Hat Linux 6.9, 32 core and 384 GB of RAM and I need to select a proper EC2 instances to host this server on AWS for recovery drill or disaster event.
Given the server size, I will be inclined to choose r5.12xlarge or r6i.12xlarge, but is RHEL 6 compatible with Nitro instances?

Thanks

Accepted Answer

Hello,

RHEL 6 is supported by DRS ([with some caveats](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/drs/latest/userguide/Supported-Operating-Systems.html#Supported-Operating-Systems-List-linux)):

* Kernel versions 2.6.32-71 are not supported in RHEL 6.0/CentOS 6.0/Oracle Linux 6.0 on AWS.
* Nitro instance types will work with RHEL 7.4+/CentOS 7.4+/Oracle Linux 7.4+. This specific limitation does not apply to other instance type families.
* Kernel versions earlier than 2.6.18-164 are not supported by AWS and Elastic Disaster Recovery. Therefore, servers that run these kernel versions cannot be replicated by Elastic Disaster Recovery.

The full list of considerations are included in the documentation above but there is no native support for RHEL 6 on nitro instance types for EC2 via DRS replication. It may certainly be possible to setup with some in-depth manual configurations but this is not directly supported by these services. You may be better suited using an r4.16xlarge instance type or upgrading your OS to RHEL 7.4+ if at all possible to utilize Nitro instance types.

RHEL6 compatibility with Nitro instances (DR scenario)

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