censhare server, database and tools requirements

Hardware and software requirements for censhare Server, the database and censhare tools for censhare versions.

CentOS will reach its end of life on June 30, 2024. Alma Linux 9 is a new officially recommended OS for the censhare Server. Please upgrade accordingly.

There are two possible migration paths:

• Recommended: Back up your existing VM, get a new one with Alma Linux 9, and set up your system based on the backup;

• Upgrade your VM from CentOS to Alma Linux directly, following those instructions from the third-party provider. Pay attention to the fact that you will need to upgrade to Alma Linux 8 first; there is no straightforward way to upgrade from CentOS 7 to Alma Linux 9.

Installation by censhare

censhare offers an installation service for censhare Server. If you plan to prepare a host and let censhare install the system software, ensure that the following requirements are fulfilled:

• Proper IP setup

• Proper DNS setup

• SSH or VNC/RDP access

• Working package management system

• NTP setup

Hardware recommendations

To achieve a good performance, there are three decisive factors:

• High memory bandwidth

• CPU performance

• Fast disk drives (SSD) for the embedded database (CDB)

We recommend current processor architectures with high memory bandwidth (e.g. Intel Ivy Bridge / Haswell) and a CPU speed of 3GHz or faster. Java parallel GC (garbage collection) is a good choice for fast GCs. For more information about garbage collection, see this Wikipedia article.

Calculate a minimum of 8 CPU threads for censhare. Large installations require more threads. Small installations can be run with fewer threads. The installation details must be calculated in the project planning phase. We recommend to calculate more CPU threads than are actually necessary for additional services like a local ServiceClient or Web Client. As guiding values, calculate a minimum of 8 GB RAM and 4 core (threads) CPU for a small demo or test system.

We recommend that files for the embedded database (CDB) are located on a separate mount point.

Virtualization

censhare with all components supports Solaris Zones and VMWare ESX version 5.1 or higher.

Java Development Kit (JDK)

The censhare Server requires the following to be installed on the host:

• Java 17 is required starting from the censhare version 2022.2

• Java 11 is required starting from the censhare version 2019.2

Older Java versions are not supported.

• a Java Development Kit; for both Java versions, we recommend JDK Amazon Corretto.

Other JDK distributions, mainly OpenJDKs, should work as well. The exception is Oracle Solaris (x86 64-bit) which does not officially support OpenJDK. Amazon Corretto JDK doesn't exists for Solaris. Oracle JDK or other supported JDK are recommended for this OS. 

Database

Postgres 15 is not compatible with censhare Server

You may use Postgres 14, but the last tested one is 13.1. (see table below).

censhare Server 

censhare tools

The latest required tools versions can be found in the redistributed.txt file in the censhare product/censhare Server folder of your deliverables.

Note that Keycloak and webpack are not mentioned in the redistributed.txt. Keycloak is a third-party tool that is not part of the censhare product. The recommendation is to always use the latest version for security reasons. The webpack bundle version must match with the server release and is not distributed separately.

Use Postgres with Keycloak

We highly recommend using Postgres database with Keycloak. Although Keycloak declares to be compatible with Oracle, unfortunately, we cannot offer support for using Oracle with Keycloak. 

In case you use an Oracle database with the censhare Server, you have two options:

•  utilize it for the Keycloak data: in this case, you have to embrace the risk of using an incompatible database that we cannot support;

• set up a separate Postgres database for Keycloak: see Install Keycloak and Upgrade Keycloak for more details.

Cloud services

The censhare Server or individual components can be installed on cloud computing platforms.