Planning

This page describes the system requirements for using Aerospike Database in either development or production environments, and how to plan based on the size of your data and the storage method you choose.

Recommended minimum requirements

The Aerospike server runs on most major 64-bit Linux distributions. It is distributed in standard RPM and Debian packages appropriate to the installation environment.

Note

• In Database 6.2, Aerospike introduced support for ARM processors compatible with the ARMv8.2-A instruction set (Neoverse N1 microarchitecture). Aerospike runs natively on Linux operating systems, such as, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Ubuntu, Debian, Amazon Linux 2. Aerospike ARM port was tested on AWS Graviton2 EC2 instances.

• In Database 6.3, support for Debian 10 ARM64 was removed. In 7.0, support for Amazon Linux 2 was removed.

• Aerospike requires Linux kernels that support 64K memory pages. This excludes RHEL 7 and RHEL 8 on ARM64, but variants such as Amazon Linux 2023 are supported.

Aerospike server is tested on a number of Linux distributions:

• Ubuntu
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)
• Debian
• Amazon Linux
• Rocky Linux
• Oracle Linux

Check the platform support page for information about the versions currently supported.

The recommended minimum system requirements for a development environment:

• 2 GB of RAM
• 2 CPU cores

Although 2 GB of RAM is sufficient for development, verify that you have sufficient RAM and disk for the amount of data you intend to store.

If you are planning for a production deployment, we recommend you review the deployment planning guide below.

Deployment planning

The recommended minimum system requirements are sufficient for a development environment, but not for a production environment. For production deployments, see the following steps to ensure your production environment is successfully deployed.

Estimating the size of your data

Before you begin, determine answers to the following fundamental questions about what you want to store. To size the hardware correctly, you must make a rough estimate of the data.

• How many records will you have? For example, how many user profiles are you expecting?
• How much data do you plan to store in each record?

Note

Aerospike allows you to add more storage later, but because hardware is relatively inexpensive, it’s a good idea to start with a rough estimate of what you’ll need.

Determining the type of storage

Aerospike allows you to store your data:

• In memory (with or without persistence to disk)
• On flash storage (SSDs)
  • with indexes in memory - Hybrid Memory Architecture (HMA)
  • with indexes in Intel Optane™ persistent memory (PMEM)
  • with the primary index on SSD (All Flash)
• On PMEM
  • with indexes in memory - Hybrid Memory Architecture (HMA)
  • with indexes in Intel Optane™ persistent memory (PMEM)

Determining the number of namespaces

The Aerospike Database stores data in namespaces. Each namespace is configured according to its storage requirements. Many Aerospike installations use a single namespace with all data being handled in the same storage media. But for example, if you want to have one group of data in memory and another group of data on SSD, you will need to configure two namespaces.

Caution

Adding a new namespace requires a full cluster restart.

Capacity planning

For assistance on how to properly size your deployment, including memory and storage requirements, refer to Capacity planning guide. You may skip this step if you are unsure of your capacity requirements or just want to try out the database.

Server hardware

For information about the hardware we support, refer to Server hardware requirements

Flash storage

For information about the Flash storage we support, refer to Flash storage guide

Network

For information about sizing and configuring your network, refer to Network guide

Note

The Aerospike Sales Engineering team is available to help you size your hardware and determine that your proposed hardware configuration is suitable for your project. Contact us for help with sizing your hardware.

If you are installing Aerospike for evaluation

• For evaluation purposes, you may find it simpler to run a test database using DRAM. Depending on your SSD, the setup process can take some time. In addition, we don’t recommend that you overprovision SSDs that are virtual drives on a laptop.
• Be careful of using Amazon to evaluate performance. Amazon is a shared platform and network latency can vary depending on traffic to other sites that are sharing the server. If you are looking to use Amazon only for evaluating, you should know that it is not a suitable choice for those that will deploy on bare metal.
• If using a VM for testing, a VM adds latency to any storage, especially SSDs. Carefully consider the configuration and type of hypervisor you use.