PCE Capacity Planning

Use these guidelines and requirements to estimate host system capacity based on typical usage patterns.

The exact requirements vary based on a large number of factors, including, but not limited to:

Whether you are using physical or virtual hardware
Number of managed workloads
Number of unmanaged workloads and other labeled objects, such as virtual services
Policy complexity, which includes the following factors:
- Number of rules in your rulesets
- Number of labels, IP lists, and other objects in your rules
- Number of IP ranges in your IP lists
- Number of workloads affected by your rules
The frequency at which your policies change
Frequency at which workloads are added or deleted, or workload context changes, such as change of IP address
Volume of traffic flows per second reported to the PCE from all VENs
See the “Maximum Flow Capacity” table for information about maximum flow capacity of the PCE.
Total number of unique flows reported to the PCE from all VENs

CPU, Memory, and Storage

The capacity planning tables in this section list the minimum recommended sizes for CPU, memory, and storage. This section provides two tables, one for physical hardware and one for virtual machines. Use these tables to plan your deployment.

Note

Based on your actual usage and other factors, your capacity needs might be greater than the recommended sizes. For example, if you have installed additional software along with the PCE, such as application performance management (APM) software or an endpoint protection agent, this consumes additional system resources.

Data nodes are configured with a dedicated storage device for each database on the data nodes. This configuration accommodates growth in traffic data, which is used by Explorer. See Runtime Parameters for Traffic Datastore on Data Nodes.

For more than 150 IOPS, locally attached, spinning hard disk drives (HDD) are not sufficient. You will require either mixed-use Solid-State Disk (SSD) or Storage Area Network (SAN).

The PCE does not require that you set up swap memory, but it is permissible to enable swap memory. As long as the PCE nodes are provisioned with the recommended memory (RAM) as shown in the tables below, the use of swap memory should not cause any issues.

Physical Hardware

Use this table if you are installing the PCE on physical hardware. If you are using virtual machines, see the table Virtual Hardware.

Cluster Type + Max VENs and Total Workloads	Cores/Clock Speed	RAM per Node	Storage Device Size and IOPS
Cluster Type + Max VENs and Total Workloads	Cores/Clock Speed	RAM per Node	Core Nodes	Data Nodes
SNC 250 VENs ¹ 1,250 total workloads ¹	3 cores ² Intel® Xeon(R) CPU E5-2695 v4 at 2.10GHz or equivalent	16GB	A single node including both core and data: 1 x 50GB⁴ 100 IOPS per device ⁵	N/A
2x2 Small 2,500 VENs ¹ 12,500 workloads ¹ Cluster type: `4node_v0_small`	4 cores per node ² Intel® Xeon(R) CPU E5-2695 v4 at 2.10GHz or equivalent	32GB	Minimum: Disk: 50GB3, ⁴ 150 IOPS per device ⁵	Minimum: Disk 1: 250GB ⁴ Disk 2: 250GB ⁴ 600 IOPS per device ⁵
2x2 10,000 VENs ¹ 50,000 workloads ¹ Cluster type: `4node_v0` or `4node_dx`	16 cores per node ^{2, 6} Intel® Xeon(R) CPU E5-2695 v4 at 2.10GHz or equivalent	Recommended: 128GB ⁶ Minimum: 64GB	Minimum: Disk: 50GB ^{3, 4} 150 IOPS per device ⁵	Minimum: Disk 1: 1TB4 Disk 2: 1TB ⁴ 1,800 IOPS per device⁵
4x2 25,000 VENs ¹ 125,000 workloads ¹ Cluster type: `6node_v0` or `6node_dx`	16 cores per node ^{2, 6} Intel® Xeon(R) CPU E5-2695 v4 at 2.10GHz or equivalent.	128GB ⁶	Minimum: Disk: 50GB ^{3, 4} 150 IOPS per device ⁵	Minimum: Disk 1: 1TB ⁴ Disk 2: 1TB ⁴ 5,000 IOPS per device ⁵

Footnotes:

¹ Number of total workloads is the sum of both managed and unmanaged workloads, which cannot exceed the maximum number of VENs (managed workloads). For example, if an SNC contains the maximum number of VENs (250), it can support only 1,000 unmanaged workloads, for a total of 1,250 workloads. If the SNC contains less than the max number of VENs, it can support more unmanaged workloads.

² CPUs: The recommended number of cores is based only on physical cores from allocated CPUs, irrespective of hyper-threading.

³ This is the absolute minimum needed. In the future, other applications, support reports, or new features may require additional disk.

⁴ Additional disk notes: Storage requirements for network traffic data can increase rapidly as the amount of network traffic increases. Network File Systems (NFS) is not supported for Illumio directories specified in runtime -- for example, data_dir, persistent_data_dir, or ephemeral_data_dir.

⁵ Input/output operations per second (IOPS) are based on 8K random write operations. IOPS specified for an average of 300 flow summaries (80% unique src_ip, dest_ip, dest_port, proto) per workload every 10 minutes. Different traffic profiles might require higher IOPS.

⁶ In the case of fresh installs or upgrades of a 2x2 for 10,000 VENs or a 4x2 for 25,000 VENs, if you deploy a system without sufficient cores, memory, or both, then the PCE will automatically reduce the object limits to 2,500 workloads. Object limit is the number of VENs (agents) per PCE. Adding more than 2,500 workloads will fail and an event is logged indicating that object limits have been exceeded. The workaround is to increase the number of cores, memory, or both to the recommended specifications and then increase the object limits manually. See PCE Default Object Limits in the PCE Administration Guide.

Virtual Hardware

Use this table if you are installing the PCE on virtual machines. If you are using physical hardware, see the table Physical Hardware.

Cluster Type + Max VENs and Total Workloads	Virtual Cores/Clock Speed	RAM per Node	Storage Device Size and IOPS
Cluster Type + Max VENs and Total Workloads	Virtual Cores/Clock Speed	RAM per Node	Core Nodes	Data Nodes
SNC 250 VENs ¹ 1,250 workloads ¹	6 virtual cores (vCPU) ² Intel® Xeon(R) CPU E5-2695 v4 at 2.10GHz or higher	16GB ⁷	Minimum: Disk: 50GB ^{3, 4} 150 IOPS per device ⁵	N/A
2x2 Small 2,500 VENs ¹ 12,500 workloads ¹ Cluster type: `4node_v0_small`	8 virtual cores (vCPU) per node ² Intel® Xeon(R) CPU E5-2695 v4 at 2.10GHz or higher	32GB ⁷	Minimum: Disk: 50GB ^{3, 4} 150 IOPS per device ⁵	Minimum: Disk 1: 250GB Disk 2: 250GB 600 IOPS per device
2x2 10,000 VENs ¹ 50,000 workloads ¹ Cluster type: `4node_v0` or `4node_dx`	32 virtual cores (vCPU) per node ^{2, 6} Intel® Xeon(R) CPU E5-2695 v4 at 2.10GHz or higher	Recommended: 128GB ^{6, 7} Minimum: 64GB	Minimum: Disk: 50GB ^{3, 4} 150 IOPS per device⁵	Minimum: Disk 1: 1TB⁴ Disk 2: 1TB⁴ 1,800 IOPS per device⁵
4x2 25,000 VENs ¹ 125,000 workloads ¹ Cluster type: `6node_v0` or `6node_dx`	32 virtual cores (vCPU) per node ^{2, 6} Intel® Xeon(R) CPU E5-2695 v4 at 2.10GHz or higher	128GB ^{6, 7}	Minimum: Disk: 50GB ^{3, 4} 150 IOPS per device ⁵	Minimum: Disk 1: 1TB⁴ Disk 2: 1TB⁴ 5,000 IOPS per device ⁵

Footnotes:

¹ Number of total workloads is the sum of both managed and unmanaged workloads, which cannot exceed the maximum number of VENs (managed workloads). For example, if an SNC contains the maximum number of VENs (250), it can support only 1,000 unmanaged workloads, for a total of 1,250 workloads. IF the SNC contains less than the max number of VENs, it can support more unmanaged workloads.

² Full reservations for vCPU. No overcommit.

³ This is the absolute minimum needed. In the future, other applications, support reports, or new features may require additional disk.

⁴ Additional disk notes:

Storage requirements for network traffic data can increase rapidly as the amount of network traffic increases.
Network File Systems (NFS) is not supported for Illumio directories specified in runtime; for example, data_dir, persistent_data_dir, or ephemeral_data_dir.

⁷ Full reservations for vRAM. No overcommit.

Maximum Flow Capacity

The following table shows the maximum capacity of the PCE to accept flow data from all VENs.

Cluster Type + VENs and Total Workloads	Flow Rate (flow-summaries/second)	Equivalent Flow Rate (flows/second)²
SNC 250 VENs 1,250 total workloads	100	1,030
2x2 2,500 VENs 12,500 total workloads	1,000	10,300
2x2 10,000 VENs 50,000 total workloads	4,100	422,000
4x2 25,000 VENs 125,000 total workloads	10,400 ¹	1,070,000

Footnotes

¹ The PCE might need to be tuned to achieve this rate. If you need to tune the PCE, please contact Illumio Support for assistance.

² Real-world observation shows that 102 flows result in one flow summary on average.

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