System Requirements

This article describes hardware and operating system requirements for Exasol data nodes and an optional jump host.

Hardware requirements

CPU and firmware

  • 64-bit x86 platforms with SSSE3 featured Intel CPUs (1 or 2 sockets) or AMD CPU (single socket only)
  • BIOS/UEFI configured for maximum performance (recommended)

Supported storage types/technologies

  • Sparse file devices hosted on a filesystem like ext4 or XFS (NFS is not supported)
  • Block devices (local storage SAS, SSD, NVMe, virtual disks, or remote storage iSCSI/SAN)
  • LVM2
  • LUKS

Additional storage requirements

  • Use at least 4 storage drives with minimum 250 MBps read/write capacity per drive.

  • OS and storage disks should have RAID 1 or similar fault tolerance.

  • OS disks must have at least 150 GiB free disk space after installation.

  • For swap partitions, use the size recommended by the OS vendor.

To learn how to calculate the required size for storage devices, see Sizing Guidelines.

The storage devices must have persistent block device names. We recommend using volume management with LVM2.

Network requirements

  • 10G, 25G, 50G, and 100G network interfaces are supported.

  • The database hosts should be assigned static IPv4 addresses in the same subnet.

    For example: 203.0.113.11, 203.0.113.12, 203.0.113.13, 203.0.113.14.

  • DHCP can be used in the network if each host always receives the same IP address.

Operating system requirements

Supported Linux distributions

Exasol 8.34.0 or later

Ubuntu 24.04 LTS

All Exasol releases

Ubuntu 22.04 LTS

Ubuntu 20.04 LTS

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8

Exasol contains a full user-level runtime environment with minimal dependencies on the host operating system. However, we cannot guarantee that future updates to the supported operating systems (especially major kernel releases) will not affect the Exasol environment.

OS configuration

  • Disable SELinux if it is installed.

  • Disable firewalls (ufw, firewalld).

  • Disable antivirus scanners.

  • Configure NTP so that time is synced between all nodes.

  • On RHEL 8 and RHEL 9, install and enable the iptables service.

  • On RHEL 8, you must manually install Python 3 on all nodes using sudo dnf install python3.

AppArmor

On systems running on Ubuntu 22.04 or 24.04 with AppArmor, the following kernel parameter must be disabled:

kernel.apparmor_restrict_unprivileged_userns

In Exasol 8.34.0 and later (c4 version 4.25.0), this parameter is automatically disabled during installation. In Exasol 8.33.0 and earlier running on Ubuntu 22.04, you must manually disable the parameter by executing the following command as root on all data nodes:

Copy 
echo 'kernel.apparmor_restrict_unprivileged_userns = 0' |
  tee /etc/sysctl.d/91-exasol-apparmor-userns.conf

sysctl -q --system

This requirement does not apply to Exasol 8.34.0 and later or to systems running on Ubuntu 20.04.

Additional requirements for jump host

If you install Exasol from a separate system (jump host), the jump host must have ssh installed and have SSH access to the database hosts using key-based authentication.

If you are using c4 version 4.24.3 or earlier to update an existing system to a newer version of Exasol, rsync must be installed on the jump host. For c4 version 4.25.0 and later, rsync is not required.