Minimum hardware recommendations - x360Recover

Written By Tami Sutcliffe (Super Administrator)

Updated at March 15th, 2024

x360Recover does not require you to purchase proprietary hardware. You can choose your own hardware if it meets the minimum hardware requirements; however, the hardware you choose must be compatible with Ubuntu Linux 20.04. 

Current versions of x360Recover ship an updated kernel, so please consult the Ubuntu compatibility column in the following links. 

The following links will assist you in determining whether or not the hardware you want to use will support Linux.

x360Recover minimum recommended hardware configuration:

OS: 8GB RAM, 4 Cores minimum recommended for 1-5 protected systems

Backing up more than 5 Servers:

  • For every additional five Protected Systems (production servers being backed up), x360Recover requires four more GB's RAM and two more cores.
  • Example: To backup 6-10 servers, x360Recover requires a minimum of 12 GB RAM and 6 cores.

Add the additional memory needed to support running the protected systems as virtual machines.

  • Example: 2 protected systems that normally run with 4GB of RAM would need the standard 8GB of RAM plus 8GB of RAM for virtualization so a total of 16GB. 
  • It is highly recommended to use ECC RAM for data protection and performance.

Machine must have at least three hard drives:

 Three physical hard drives are required as a minimum: 

  • 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
  • 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.

Please note: Nightly Boot VM Checks are enabled by default and require an additional 2 GB of RAM and 2 available CPU cores to perform. 

Minimum Recommendations    

Compatability

  • Must be compatible with Ubuntu Linux 20.04

  • 64-bit OS 

Hard Drives

SMR-based hard drives are not suitable as x360Recover storage devices**

Three physical hard drives are required as a minimum:

  • 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
  • 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* and 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 RAID controllers are not supported
  • We highly recommend installing on bare metal
  • Microsoft Volume Shadowcopy Service (VSS) requires sufficient free space on the disk to maintain changed data during backup operations. We recommend maintaining at least 10% free space on each drive volume to ensure sufficient free space is available to backup the system.

 * Represents minimum recommended resources


** 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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