Before you start VM

Review these system requirements before installing the Intelligence Center.
This section covers the necessary hardware and software requirements to set up Intelligence Center as a virtual appliance.

Hardware requirements

Hardware requirements for EclecticIQ Intelligence Center can vary, depending on the target system and the environment you plan to install the Intelligence Center to.
The requirements outlined in this section are general guidelines that work in most cases, but they are not tailored to any specific situation or use case.

Single box

Hardware requirement guidelines for EclecticIQ intelligence Center and related dependencies installation on a single system/machine.

HW area

Minimum

Recommended

Notes

CPUs

4

8

Core count includes HT.

CPU speed

2.5 GHz

2.5 GHz or faster


Memory

32 GB

64 GB or more

  • A production environment should feature at least 64 GB memory.
    Consider increasing the memory to 96 GB when dealing with, for example, large data corpora ingestion or data-intensive graph visualizations.

  • Redis requires at least 4 GB memory (maxmemory 4gb in /etc/eclecticiq-redis/redis.conf).
    Consider increasing the memory to 8 GB or more to process very long queues (millions of queued items).

  • Operations and tasks carried out through the web-based GUI may be memory-intensive.
    Occasionally, the web browser may use ~1 GB or more.

  • Monitor system memory usage to determine if your system requires increasing memory to operate smoothly.

Storage

SATA, 100 IOPS

SSD, 200-500 IOPS

  • Local attached storage is preferable to SAN or NAS.
    Intelligence Center operations are write-intensive.

  • Recommended IOPS range: 200-500.

Drives

5

10

10 drives enable setting up 5 sets of mirrored drives (RAID 1).

Drive sizes (GB)

10, 10, 25, 50, 200

20, 20, 50, 75, 300

Each Intelligence Center database should be allocated to a dedicated drive for data storage.

Drive allocation (GB)

10

20

Root (EclecticIQ Intelligence Center + Redis).


10

20

Log data storage.


25

50

Neo4J, graph database.


100

150

Elasticsearch, searching and indexing.

On average, allocate Elasticsearch about half the amount of space you assign to PostgreSQL.


200

300

PostgreSQL, main data storage.

Network

2 network interfaces

2 network interfaces

One interface for production, the other for system management.

Install size

~240 GB

~240 GB

Full install, based on the VM image size.

Data mount points

When installing and configuring Intelligence Center components such as PostgreSQL, Redis, Elasticsearch, and Neo4j specify dedicated locations where these products store their data.

These are the recommended mount point paths for each data store:

Component

Mount point

Minimum size (GB)

Recommended size (GB)

Logs

/var/log

10

20

Elasticsearch

/media/elasticsearch

100

150

Neo4j

/media/neo4j

25

50

PostgreSQL

/media/pgsql

200

300

Redis

/media/redis

10

20

About Redis

In a single box installation scenario, Redis is installed to the root partition where the Intelligence Center is installed to.
During the configuration step, you can set the Redis data location in the redis.conf configuration file.

The recommended target directory for Redis data is /media/redis.
This is not a mount point on a separate partition, it is a subdirectory in the root partition.

Software requirements

To work with a platform instance running as a virtual appliance, you need:

  • VMWare Player or VirtualBox.
    Supported VMWare product versions:

    • ESXi 5.5

    • Fusion 6.x

    • Workstation 10.x

    • Player 6.x

  • Internet connectivity

  • A web browser with JavaScript enabled.

  • Supported web browser: Google Chrome (latest)

To correctly configure the system after installing the required dependencies and third-party products, ensure you have the following information available:

  • Fully qualified domain name of the host machine you are going to use to access the Intelligence Center.

  • SSL certificate and key for the web server.

  • EclecticIQ Intelligence Center login credentials.

When EclecticIQ Platform is shipped as a VM image, it does not include Neo4j.
You need to install Neo4j manually as a separate step.

EclecticIQ Platform login

During the installation, you are prompted to assign the administrator account a user name and a password.
By default, when performing a platform installation you are prompted to create only an administrator account, because at any given time the platform requires at least one active administrator user profile.

Follow these guidelines to define a strong password:

  • It should be between 10 and 64 characters long.

  • It should contain at least one uppercase alphabetic character.

  • It should contain at least one special character.

  • It should contain at least one number.

  • It should not reuse a previous password.
    User password history logs the previous 100 passwords.

  • It should not be on NBP, the NIST Bad Passwords list.

  • It should not include the user name it is associated with.

For more information, see the NIST digital identity guidelines.