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 and a CPU speed of 3GHz or faster. Java G1 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 Java Development Kit to be installed on the host. We recommend OpenJDK version 11, except for Oracle Solaris (x86 64-bit), which does not officially support OpenJDK. Oracle JDK 11 or other supported JDK 11 are recommended on this OS. Older Java versions are not supported.

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).

Oracle

PostgreSQL

Minimum version

10cR2

9.6.3

Tested version

18

19

12 (censhare 2020.1 + 2020.2)

13.1 (censhare 2020.3)

Remarks

censhare supports all Oracle-certified Linux distributions (SE and EE). See Oracle notes 742060.1 and 756671.1. If you run your Oracle database in a virtual environment, see this Whitepaper before you start your installation.

censhare supports PostgreSQL on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (64-bit), CentOS 7 (64-bit), Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 Compatible distributions, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (64-bit) and Oracle Linux (64-bit). For a detailed installation manual see the PostgreSQL installation article or the official documentation.

censhare Server

Operating System	min. version	max. version	Remarks
Alma Linux	9	9	Recommended installation.
~~CentOS (64-bit)~~	~~7.x~~	~~7.x~~	~~Deprecated by the 3d-party provider~~
Red Hat Enterprise Linux (64-bit)	7.x	8.x	No standard installation packages are available. Installation packages may require some adaptations.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 Compatible Distribution (64-bit)	8.x	8.x
Oracle Linux (64-bit)	6.x	8.x
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (x86 64-bit)	12.x	15

censhare tools

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

Component	Use	Required	Version
Keycloak	Open-source identity and access management solution	Mandatory	v9 - v21.1.2 Recommended: v21.1.2
Cloud Gateway	Required to route the incoming requests from the web browser.	Mandatory	censhare-core-cloud-gateway-2.1.0-0.noarch.rpm
Static Resource Server	Distributes webpack bundles.	Mandatory	censhare-static-resource-server-2.3.2-0.noarch.rpm
webpack	Bundle static resources to serve them to the web browser.	Mandatory	Required bundles are provided in the download folder of your censhare version.
Google Cloud AI microservice	Provides Google Cloud AI analysis in censhare	Optional	censhare-google-ai-1.1.4-0.noarch.rpm
Social Media microservice	Required to publish content from censhare to social networks (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube)	Optional	censhare-social-media-1.0.3-0.noarch.rpm
Mail service	Provides OAuth 2.0 modern authentication for Email service.	Optional	censhare-core-mail-0.4.4-0.noarch.rpm

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.

Cloud platform	Components		Remarks
Amazon Web Services (AWS)	censhare Server	Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2)	For more information, see Amazon Web Services. For the AWS regions, see this page.
	Database	Amazon Relational Database Service (ARDS) with Oracle or PostgreSQL database
	Asset file system	Simple Storage Service (S3)
	Interface file system (hotfolders)	Elastic Block Store (EBS)
Microsoft Azure	censhare standard applications can be hosted and run		Azure Storage is only supported using Azure Files Storage. For more information contact your partner manager.