If your site runs on a virtual machine, it may be restricted from accessing some processor features supported by the underlying hardware. This is typically done to allow the virtual machine to be moved between host systems with different processor types.
If you are running Chorus in a virtual machine, please check the following:
- HyperV: Processor compatibility mode should be disabled
- VMware: If EVC used, EVC should be set to Ivy Bridge or higher (see below)
- QEMU/KVM: Run with -cpu host (or at least -cpu Ivybridge)
Also be careful in your choice of network and SCSI adaptors. Failure to use the recommendations may lead to an unbootable system.
Minimum system requirements
This is the minimal system required to run the Chorus software, and should only be used for testing or proof-of-concept deployments.
- Quad-core Intel Xeon E-series
- 8GB RAM
- System disk, with at least 2x installed RAM (or a minimum of 25GB) capacity.
- 100Mb network interface
Recommended Virtual Machine configuration (up to 2TB)
- 6 cores
- 12GB RAM
- 30GB system disk on SSD
Recommended Virtual Machine configuration (up to 6TB)
- 8 cores
- 20GB RAM
- 50GB system disk on SSD datastore
Recommended Virtual Machine configuration (up to 12TB)
- 12 cores
- 32GB RAM
- 80GB system disk on SSD datastore
Recommended system specification (up to 8TB)
- Intel Xeon E2300 series
- 32GB ECC RAM
- 100GB SSD
- Gigabit network
- Hardware RAID 1/10 of enterprise 7200rpm disks
Recommended system specification (up to 16TB)
- AMD EPYC 16-core
- 64GB ECC RAM
- Mixed-use NVMe SSD (200GB or more)
- Gigabit network
- Hardware RAID 10 of enterprise 7200rpm disks
Recommended system specification (up to 100TB)
- AMD EPYC 32-core
- 128GB ECC RAM
- Mixed-use PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD (400GB or more)
- Gigabit or better network
- Hardware RAID 6 of enterprise 7200rpm disks
Supported CPUs
For new installations, based on Debian 10, the minimum supported CPU feature level is 'Ivy Bridge' - this includes the MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3, SSE4.1, SSE4.2, POPCNT, AVX, AES, PCLMUL, RDRND/RDSEED, FSGSBASE and F16C instruction sets.
- Intel Xeon E3-1200v2 series "Ivy Bridge"
- Intel Xeon E5-1600v2 series "Ivy Bridge"
- Intel Xeon E5-2400v2 series "Ivy Bridge"
- Intel Xeon E5-2600v2 series "Ivy Bridge"
- Intel Xeon E7-2800v2 series "Ivy Bridge"
- Intel Xeon E7-4800v2 series "Ivy Bridge"
- Intel Xeon E3-1200v3 series "Haswell"
- Intel Xeon E5-2600v3 series "Haswell"
- Intel Xeon E3-1200v5 series "Skylake"
- Intel Xeon E3-1200v6 series "Kaby Lake"
- Intel Xeon E5-2600v4 series "Broadwell"
- Intel Xeon E-2100 series "Coffee Lake"
- Intel Xeon E-2200 series "Coffee Lake"
- Intel Xeon E-2300 series "Rocket Lake"
- Intel Xeon SPv1 series "Skylake"
- Intel Xeon SPv2 series "Cascade Lake"
- Intel Xeon SPv3 series "Ice Lake" / "Cooper Lake"
- AMD EPYC 7001 series "Naples"
- AMD EPYC 7002 series "Rome"
- AMD EPYC 7003 series "Milan"
Older CPUs lack needed instruction sets, and will encounter errors, especially around video processing.
Equivalent desktop processors will work but are strongly discouraged - in particular since these parts lack ECC memory support.
Supported RAID cards
There is extensive hardware RAID support in the Linux kernel. Software based cards are generally more problematic.
The following is a non-exhaustive list of cards that have been tested to work.
- LSI 936x series
- Broadcom 946x series
- Broadcom 948x series
- Broadcom 956x series
- Broadcom 958x series
- 3ware 9750
- Intel Integrated RAID modules
- Dell H200/H700/H800 series
- HP Smart Array series
- Adaptec 6800 series
- IBM ServeRAID 8 series
Changing the EVC mode in VMWare
1 | Display the cluster in the inventory. |
2 | Right-click the cluster and select Edit Settings. |
3 | In the left panel, select VMware EVC. The dialog box displays the current EVC settings. |
4 | To edit the EVC settings, click Change. |
5 | From the VMware EVC Mode drop-down menu, select the baseline CPU feature set you want to enable for the cluster. If the selected EVC Mode cannot be selected, the Compatibility pane displays the reason or reasons why, along with the relevant hosts for each reason. |
6 | Click OK to close the EVC Mode dialog box, and click OK to close the cluster settings dialog box. |
Storage Performance
System disks and root partition:
The storage for the system disk should be as fast as possible. RAID over SATA SSDs is fine, NVMe is better; the write load for this is not especially high, so ‘Mixed Use’ SSDs are very suitable. IOPS level is in the order of 1k, but is latency-sensitive (aim for sub-0.5ms 95% of the time, and sub-0.2ms on average). When paritioning, allow at least 2xRAM+16GB for the root volume (so with 32GB RAM, allocate 80GB). If /var is mounted separately, allow at least 1.5x RAM for this volume; in this case root can be reduced accordingly. Specifically, the RDBMS will preallocate at least 10% of RAM in /var/lib/mysql for InnoDB logs in addition to actual data stored, so systems with large amounts of memory must have corresponding disk space.
Storage disks (/space partition):
Throughput should be no less than 200MB/s+5MB/s per TB stored. Latency is more significant than IOPS; aim for average random read latency better than 5ms, and average random write latency of 2ms or less (which means that some form of write back cache is involved). IO buffers and read-ahead also help significantly.
During installation, you may see a message:
"CPU is unsupported. Your CPU seems to be missing needed features (SSSE3, SSE4.1, SSE4.2)"
Chorus may behave unpredictably if you continue, and will not be supported. In this event, please check the supported CPU list above, and also the notes at the top of the page about virtualised compatibility modes.
After installation, the equivalent may be displayed on the left hand side in the Administrative interface as:
"Chorus has detected that it is running on a processor that lacks needed features - this may cause unpredictable behaviour"
