System Requirements

This section describes the general hardware and operating system requirements for Exasol data nodes and for 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)

Network

  • 10G, 25G, 50G, and 100G network interfaces are supported.
  • The database hosts must be assigned subsequent static IPv4 addresses in the same subnet.
  • DHCP can be used if the hosts always receive the same IP address.

Storage requirements

  • At least 4 storage drives with minimum 250 MBps read/write capacity per drive
  • All OS and storage disks should have RAID 1 (or similar fault tolerance)
  • RAID 1 disks must be passed directly to storage – nested RAID levels such as RAID 10 are not supported
  • OS disks must have at least 150 GiB free disk space after installation
  • Swap partition (use size recommended by OS vendor)

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

Operating system requirements

Exasol 8 contains a full user-level runtime environment with minimal dependencies on the host operating system. However, there is no guarantee that future OS updates, especially major kernel releases, will not affect the Exasol environment.

Recommended Linux distributions

  • Ubuntu 22.04 LTS
  • Ubuntu 20.04 LTS
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8

Operating system configuration

  • Disable SELinux (if installed)
  • Disable firewalls (ufw, firewalld)
  • Disable antivirus scanners
  • Configure NTP so that time is synced between all nodes
  • On RHEL, install and enable the iptables service

Jump host system additional requirements

If you install Exasol from a separate system (jump host), the following additional requirements apply to the system running the installation:

  • rsync, ssh, uuidgen, and either wget or curl must be installed

  • The jump host must have SSH access to the database hosts using key-based authentication. For more information, see Configure SSH Authentication.