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)

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 .

  • Swap partition - use the size recommended by the 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

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

  • Ubuntu 24.04 LTS (Exasol 8.34.0 with c4 version 4.25.0 or later)

  • 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 8/9, install and enable the iptables service

Exasol 8 contains a full user-level runtime environment with minimal dependencies on the host operating system. However, we cannot guarantee that future updates to the operating systems (especially major kernel releases) will not affect the Exasol environment.

Exasol Deployment Tool (c4) requires Python 3, which is not pre-installed in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8. If you are installing Exasol 8 on RHEL 8 you must manually install Python 3 on all database nodes using the following command: sudo dnf install python3

AppArmor additional requirements

On systems running on Ubuntu 22.04 and 24.04 with AppArmor, the kernel parameter kernel.apparmor_restrict_unprivileged_userns must be disabled. 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:

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.

Jump host system additional requirements

If you install Exasol from a separate system (jump host), the system running the installation 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 8, rsync must be installed on the jump host. For c4 version 4.25.0 and later, rsync is not required. To check which c4 version is installed on the jump host, use ./c4 --version.