Hardware prerequisites

ECE has specific hardware requirements for memory and storage. The host machines you use must support the x86-64 instruction set.

¹ Allocators must be sized to support your Elasticsearch clusters and Kibana instances. We recommend host machines that provide between 128 GB and 256 GB of memory. While smaller hosts might not pack larger Elasticsearch clusters and Kibana instances as efficiently, larger hosts might provide fewer CPU resources per GB of RAM on average. For example, running 64 * 2GB nodes on a 128GB host with 16 vCPUs means that each node will get 2/128 of the total CPU time. This is 1/4 core on average, and might not be sufficient. We recommend inspecting both what is the expected number and size of the nodes you plan to run on your hosts in order to understand which hardware will work best in your environment.

² For high availability, requires three hosts each of the capacities indicated, spread across three availability zones.

³ For high availability, requires three hosts each of the capacities indicated (except for allocators), spread across three availability zones. For allocators, requires three or more hosts of the capacity indicated, spread across three availability zones.

The size of your ECE deployment has a bearing on the JVM heap sizes that you should specify during installation. To learn more, check JVM Heap Sizes.

¹ Control-plane services usually require about 1:4 RAM-to-storage ratio, this may vary.

² For example, if you use a host with 256 GB of RAM and the default ratio of 1:32, your host must provide 8192 GB of disk space.

The ECE management services provided by the coordinators and directors require fast SSD storage to work correctly. For smaller deployments that co-locate the ECE management services with proxies and allocators on the same hosts, you must use fast SSD storage for your entire deployment. If SSD-only storage is not feasible, some of the ECE management services need to be separated.