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Requirements

Basic Knowledge

ELMA appliance comes out of the box without any Linux graphical user interface. Therefore it is useful to have some basic knowledge of working with a Linux shell because some operation and administration tasks only can be done with shell commands.

The default shell in openSUSE is Bash (GNU Bourne-Again Shell).

For more detailed installation instructions and deployment strategies, see the openSUSE documentation.

System and Hardware Requirements

  • Pentium III 500 MHz or higher processor (Pentium 4 2.4 GHz or higher or any AMD64 or Intel EM64T processor recommended)

  • 4096 MB physical RAM (8 GB recommended)

  • A minimum of 1 GB Elasticsearch heap space (50% of available system RAM for busy systems recommended)

  • It is strongly recommend that the Hardware (CMOS/BIOS) clock, system and local time is set to UTC/GMT!

  • 40 GB available disk space for the base system with following volume mount paths:

    / (8192 MB)
    /srv/ (4096 MB)
    /var/lib/elasticsearch (16384 MB)
    /var/log/ (8192 MB)
    /var/spool/ (4096 MB)
    
  • Separate or extended LVM Volumes with a sizing depending on your specific requirements:

    /var/lib/elasticsearch (ElasticSearch default working space)
    /var/log/syslog (rsyslog flat file archive)
    

A busy system will blow up ElasticSearch or rsyslog working space with data relatively quickly. Assuming an average message lenght of 244 Byte per message and 10.000 events per second the following projection can give you an idea of difficulties for suitable filesystem sizing:

  Benchmark LVM Volume second minute hour day week month year
Messages     10 k 600 k 36 M 864 M 6.048 M 181.440 M 2.177.280 M
Compressed data size omfile /var/log/syslog 0.03 MB 1.74 MB 104.40 MB 2.45 GB 17.13 GB 68.51 GB 822.15 GB
Compressed data size omelasticsearch /var/lib/elasticsearch 3.50 MB 210.00 MB 12.30 GB 295.31 GB 2.02 TB 8.07 TB 96.90 TB

It is strongly recommended to use seperate hard disks both for your data and archive file systems using integrated Logical Volume Manager (LVM) inside ELMA CLI. Then ELMA appliance is completely independant from your application data and can easily upgraded.

To clone ELMA appliance and make necessary adaptations inside SUSEstudio is also a suitable method.

Partition Setup

The ELMA integrated Logical Volume Manager (LVM) setup provides in most cases a reasonable partition scheme that can be accepted without change.

Logical Volume Manager (LVM) applies to the Disk image, VMware, OVF and Preload ISO formats only!

To make changes in the proposal (like changing the file system type or encrypt partitions), select Edit Partition Setup and adjust the settings. See using the YaST Partitioner for further instructions.

File System Sizing

df -h

Filesystem                         Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
devtmpfs                           2.0G   40K  2.0G   1% /dev
tmpfs                              2.0G     0  2.0G   0% /dev/shm
tmpfs                              2.0G  6.6M  2.0G   1% /run
/dev/mapper/systemVG-LVRoot        7.5G  2.0G  5.2G  28% /
tmpfs                              2.0G     0  2.0G   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
tmpfs                              2.0G  6.6M  2.0G   1% /var/run
tmpfs                              2.0G  6.6M  2.0G   1% /var/lock
/dev/vda1                          199M   53M  136M  28% /boot
/dev/mapper/systemVG-LVvar_log_    7.8G  159M  7.2G   3% /var/log
/dev/mapper/systemVG-LVvar_spool_  3.9G  137M  3.6G   4% /var/spool
/dev/mapper/systemVG-LVopt_        3.9G  219M  3.5G   6% /opt
/dev/mapper/dataVG-LVdata           63G  266M   60G   1% /var/lib/elasticsearch
/dev/mapper/syslogVG-LVsyslog       63G  201M   60G   1% /var/log/syslog