2a. BYOD appliance requirements - x360Recover

Written By Tami Sutcliffe (Super Administrator)

Updated at August 22nd, 2024

If you choose to configure your own appliance hardware, you will need to select hardware that meets the minimum recommended requirements listed below.

For detailed instructions on deploying x360Recover on your own hardware, see
 Install the OS - x360Recover - BDR


Minimum recommended requirements

Important hardware considerations:



Intel Pentium and i-class 13th generation CPU's require Linux kernel version 6.1.0 or newer. x360recover is currently running on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, which DOES NOT HAVE the option to install 6.x Linux kernel versions. 13th generation and newer Intel CPU's will not be supported until the appliance is upgraded to Ubuntu 22.04, which is targeted for Q1 of 2025.

Nvidia chipsets and especially video devices are very poorly supported by Linux in general and NOT recommended for use in x360Recover appliance devices.

Compatibility:  
 
  • Must be compatible with Ubuntu Linux 20.04
  • 64-bit OS
  • Secure Boot must be disabled in BIOS when using EFI mode
Hard Drives:  
 

SMR-based hard drives are not suitable as Replibit storage devices.**  

We recommend at least 3 physical hard drives:

  • One drive must be dedicated to the operating system. A minimum of 100 GBs is needed for the OS drive, but use of a 256 GB M.2 is recommended. NVMe is supported with x360Recover v8.2.3 and above. 
    • NVMe drives are supported for use as an OS drive (including use for Nano/Single-disk installations where the OS and storage on placed on a single drive) in x360Recover version 8.2.3 and above. NVMe disks may be used as storage pool disks in Standard installation mode only in x360Recover version 14.1.0 or higher.
  • The remaining two or more drives must be used for storage in a RAID1, RAID5 or RAID6 set.
  • x360Recover uses a software RAID. If your BDR has a hardware RAID controller it must be set to a RAID0 or JBOD configuration. Some RAID controllers may not be supported.
Requirements to Back Up
 1-5 protected systems:  
 
  • 8 GB RAM*
  • 4 cores*
Requirements to Back Up
 6+ protected systems:  
 
  • For every 5 additional protected systems, we recommend an additional 4 GB RAM and an additional 2 cores
  • For example, to protect 6-10 protected systems you will need at least:
    • 12 GB RAM*
    • 6 cores*
Virtual Machine requirements:  
 

If you are planning to run protected systems as virtual machines for instant recovery, we recommend these additional requirements:  

  • Processor must support hardware assisted virtualization:
    • Intel VT
    • AMD-V  
      Note: VMware ESXi 5.5+ supports only Intel processors for nested virtualization.
  • Include additional RAM and CPU cores:
    • Double the RAM requirements outlined above.
    • We recommend ECC RAM.
    • Boot VM checks are enabled by default and require an additional 2GB of RAM and 2 available CPU cores to perform.
Additional 
considerations:  
 
  • Hybrid Software/Hardware (Motherboard) RAID controllers are not supported by the Linux Operating System
  • We highly recommend installing on bare metal




 
* Represents minimum recommended requirements

**  SMR Hard Drives­--Shingled magnetic recording (SMR) is a hard drive storage technology that improves data density and storage capacity on disk, at the expense of write performance. SMR drives achieve high storage density by overlapping tracks of data slightly on top of neighboring tracks. The underlying storage mechanism writes entire tracks in a high density fashion that is not conducive to the random write patterns associated with the native copy-on-write functionality of ZFS. Severe performance limitations have been observed with x360Recover when employing SMR-based hard drives, and these storage devices are not recommended for use with x360Recover.


 


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