This section lists the general hardware and software requirements.
Exalead CloudView also has specific requirements for Windows and Linux.
Character Encoding
Only use UTF-8 characters < 0xFFFF in the Administration Console and API Console. The UI deletes other characters.
Browser Requirements
ExaleadExalead CloudView interfaces require modern browsers that support CSS2 style sheets and JavaScript. We guarantee the following browsers only:
• Mozilla Firefox: latest stable version
• Google Chrome: latest stable version
• Microsoft Internet Explorer version 9.0 or higher (the Mashup Builder interface does not work on previous versions).
• Microsoft Edge Chromium.
Server Requirements
Disk Recommendations
Exalead CloudView performance is strongly correlated to I/O performance:
Disk Element
Recommendations
Hard drives
• SCSI, SAS, or SSD disks
• Local drives or Fibre Channel SAN
• 1000 IOPS minimum
• Do not use SATA
File system
• NFS is compatible (Linux only).
• SMB is compatible (Windows only).
• CIFS is not supported.
Disk space
Minimum 10 GB of available disk space. The local disk must also have a sizable amount of available disk space for the indexing chain and the search index.
The size of the search index is proportional to the total amount of indexed text from all searchable documents.
Disk speed
10k RPM
Memory
Minimum 8 GB RAM.
Clock Synchronization
Ensure that all clocks on all servers where you install Exalead CloudView or with which Exalead CloudView communicates (for example database servers, portal front-end servers, directory servers), are synchronized using technology such as NTP synchronization.
Virtual Machine (VM)
You can install Exalead CloudView on virtualized environments. It has been successfully tested on VMWare, Xen (Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud EC2), KVM, and Hyper-V.
Recommendation: For performance reasons, use native disks instead of file-based storage. It is better to use direct attached storage or SAN.
The virtual environment can affect search response times, in particular if there are several virtual hosts, as there are network and hardware resources sharing (for example, CPU and RAM).
In a high-availability VM-based architecture, when using relocation, install Exalead CloudView with a public hostname that you can reroute to a new VM.
To avoid changes in host ID when virtual machines restart, use the <INSTALLDIR>/tools/nghostid tool.
Security Software
Some antivirus or firewalls may interfere with Exalead CloudView depending on features, configurations, and versions. Exalead CloudView requires low-level access to memory, disks, and network. It can lead to false positives in some security software that are analyzing system call patterns.
If you experience such an issue:
• Add exceptions related to Exalead CloudView processes and ports.
• Update your antivirus to the latest version.
If you encounter difficulties finding acceptable settings for your security software and Exalead CloudView still fails to start, add NG=noinject to the ngstart.env file in <DATADIR>/bin.
Note: This setting may inhibit kill orders.
After installing Exalead CloudView, disable any antivirus software on the DATADIR directory.
Some antivirus may also consider that the Exalead CloudView kit contains malware. This is because it contains a list of html extracts used by well known spam sites, in INSTALLDIR/resource/all-arch/resource/htmlPatterns/v2/PatternsSpam.txt, so that the Exalead CloudView web crawler can avoid them.
Recommendation: Deactivate the check of the Exalead CloudView kit by your antivirus.
FIPS Mode
Exalead CloudView does not work if the OS is set up in FIPS mode, typically to conform with the US government security practices. This is because it uses MD5 as a standard hash function and not for cryptographic purposes.
Network Requirements
Network Recommendations
Protocols
dual stack IPv4+IPv6 is supported and advised
IPv4-only is supported
IPv6-only with IPv4 protocol disabled is not supported
Local network speed
Gigabit Ethernet connection or faster required
10-Gigabit Ethernet connection advised
DNS
Machine hostname must be resolvable to the machine IP address.
Machine reverse IP must be resolvable to the machine hostname.
For multihost deployments, you must open network routes between hosts according to the port range configured (see Port Ranges). Deploy hosts in the same LAN (discuss WAN cases with your architect).
Port Ranges
You need to allocate 100 consecutive TCP ports for Exalead CloudView.
For example, Exalead CloudView installs by default on port 10000 (known as the baseport), so it uses ports 10000-10100:
• The Exalead CloudView User Interface uses the base port number 10000.
• The Exalead CloudViewAdministration Console, which allows you to configure the Exalead CloudView backend, uses port 10001.
If you need to change the baseport, you can specify a different base port during installation, using the -port parameter.
Recommendation: Avoid using the ephemeral port ranges:
All Exalead CloudView Services including: Administration Console and Mashup Builder
<BASEPORT>+2
Push API - used by connectors to push data collected from data sources to the Exalead CloudView index.
<BASEPORT>+10
Search and Mashup (Access) APIs
<BASEPORT>+11
Gateway and Management APIs
Recommendation:
• Use a reverse proxy to serve end users on port 80.
• Filter incoming traffic to the Exalead CloudView host with a firewall.
Common Issues
You may need to open the ports for the baseport entry points on your firewall. Once the installation is complete, you can access the Exalead CloudView Services available at BASEPORT+1, for example, http://host:10001.