Operating System Requirements

Microsoft Windows

SonicWALL GMS supports the following Microsoft Windows operating systems:

•	Windows Server 2012 Standard 64-bit

•	Windows Server 2012 R2 Standard 64-bit (English and Japanese language versions)

•	Windows Server 2012 R2 Datacenter

•	Windows Server 2008 R2 Datacenter

•	Windows Server 2008 SBS R2 64-bit

•	Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard 64-bit

•	Windows Server 2008 SP2 64-bit

•	Windows Server 2003 64-bit (SP2)

These Windows systems can either run in physical standalone hardware platforms, or as a virtual machine under Windows Server 2008 and 2012 Hyper-V or VMware ESXi.

TIP: For best performance and scalability, it is recommended to use a 64-bit Windows operating system. Bundled databases run in 64-bit mode on 64-bit Windows operating systems. All listed operating systems are supported in both virtualized and non-virtualized environments. In a Hyper-V virtualized environment, Windows Server is a guest operating system running on Hyper-V. GMS is then installed on the Windows Server virtual machine that is layered over Hyper-V.

NOTE: GMS is not supported on MS-Windows Server virtual machines running in cloud services, such as Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services EC2.

Hardware for Windows Server

Use the Capacity Calculator 2 to determine the hardware requirements for your deployment.

NOTE: A Windows 64-bit operating system with a RAM of 16GB is highly recommended for better performance of reporting modules. Read Capacity Planning and Performance Tuning .

Hard Drive HDD Specifications

The following hard drive HDD specifications are required when using GMS software on Windows Server or a GMS Virtual Appliance:

•	Spindle Speed: 10,000 RPM or higher

•	Cache: 64 MB or higher

•	Transfer rate: 600 MBs or higher

•	Average Latency: 4 microseconds or lower

SonicWALL GMS Virtual Appliance

The elements of basic VMware structure must be implemented prior to deploying the GMS Virtual Appliance. The GMS Virtual Appliance runs on the following VMware platforms:

•	ESXi 4.0 Update 1 (Build 208167 and newer)

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ESXi 4.1

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ESXi 5.0

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ESXi 5.1

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ESXi 5.5

•	ESX 4.0 Update 1 (Build 208167 and newer)

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ESX 4.1

Use the following client applications to import the image and configure the virtual settings:

•	VMware vSphere – Provides infrastructure and application services in a graphical user interface for ESX/ESXi, included with ESX/ESXi. Allows you to specify Thin or Thick (Flat) provisioning when deploying GMS Virtual Appliance.

•	VMware vCenter Server – Centrally manages multiple VMware ESX/ESXi environments. Provides Thick provisioning when deploying GMS Virtual Appliance.

Deployment Considerations:

•	All modules are 64-bit.

•	GMS management is not supported on Apple MacOS.

•	Using the Flow Server Agent role requires a minimum of:

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Quad core

•	16 GB of memory

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300 HDD

•	Use the Capacity Calculator 2 to determine the hardware requirements for your deployment.

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The performance of GMS Virtual Appliance depends on the underlying hardware. It is highly recommended to dedicate all the resources that are allocated to the Virtual Appliance, especially the hard-disk (datastore). In environments with high volumes of syslogs or AppFlow (IPFIX), you will need to dedicate local datastores to the GMS Virtual Appliance.

NOTE: When the GMS Virtual Appliance is booting for the first time, it takes longer for the server to become available. Do NOT Power Off/On the appliance during this time as doing so will cause the boot to fail and an “Available disk space...” error message to appear. Redo the role configuration, be patient, and the configuration should be successful.

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When using Thick, or Flat, provisioning as the storage type option, the entire amount of disk space is allocated when you import and deploy the GMS Virtual Appliance file. When using Thin provisioning, the initial size is very small and will grow dynamically as more disk space is needed by the GMS application, until the maximum size is reached. After being allocated, the size does not shrink if the application space requirements are subsequently reduced. Additional disk space provided to the GMS Virtual Appliance in the virtual environment, beyond the respective limits of 250GB or 950GB, is not utilized. ESX/ESXi can be configured with datastores of varying block sizes. The 4 or 8MB requirement for the 950GB deployment is because the block size determines the largest virtual disk that can be deployed, as shown in the table:

 

Table 1. Datastore block sizes

Block Size of Datastore	Largest Virtual Disk
1MB	256GB
2MB	512GB
4MB	1TB
8MB	2TB