Installation guide

4
Resource Requirements
This section describes SecurityCenter’s minimum requirements for hardware, network, and disk storage. Note that the
particular needs of your organization must be factored into this guideline.
Recommended Minimum Hardware Requirements
The following chart outlines the minimum hardware requirements for operating the SecurityCenter.
Table 1 – Hardware Requirements
Scenario
Minimum Recommended Hardware
SecurityCenter managing
500 to 2,500 active IPs
CPU: 1 dual-core 2 GHz or greater CPU
Memory: 4 GB RAM
Hard drive: 120 GB at 7,200 rpm (320 GB at 10,000 rpm recommended)
SecurityCenter managing
2,500 to 10,000 active IPs
CPU: 1 dual-core 3 GHz CPU (2 dual-core recommended)
Memory: 4 GB RAM
Hard drive: 160 GB at 7,200 rpm (500 GB at 10,000 rpm recommended)
SecurityCenter managing
10,000 to 25,000 active IPs
CPU: 2 dual-core 3 GHz CPU (1 quad-core recommended)
Memory: 8 GB RAM
Hard drive: 500 GB at 10,000 rpm (1 TB at 15,000 rpm with striped RAID
recommended)
SecurityCenter managing
more than 25,000 active IPs
CPU: 2 quad-core 3 GHz CPU (4 dual-core recommended or 2 quad-core 3 GHz
CPU)
Memory: 16 GB RAM
Hard drive: 1 TB at 15,000 rpm (3 TB at 15,000 rpm with striped RAID recommended)
In addition to the above guidelines, please consider the following suggestions:
 If the Nessus scanner is deployed on the same system as SecurityCenter, there will be less CPU and memory
available during scans, causing slower performance. Use multi-core and/or multiple CPU servers to alleviate this.
In addition, placing the scanner on a secondary machine will alleviate performance bottlenecks.
 For deployments of SecurityCenter with more than 25 active users, add additional memory or CPUs to improve
performance.
 If one or more Passive Vulnerability Scanners are in use, use multi-core and/or multiple CPU servers to increase
performance.
 As a general rule, use the aggregate of the individual software product resource requirements for determining
total hardware system requirements.
Network Interfaces
Bandwidth usage during a scan does not sustain higher than a few MB/s. Many of Tenable’s customers use 100 MB
interface cards for network scanning. There is no compelling requirement to use gigabit network cards at this time.
However, such an interface may make sense to generally increase the overall performance of web sessions, emails, LCE
queries, and other network activities.
If Nessus is deployed on the same server as SecurityCenter, consider configuring the server with multiple network cards
and IP addresses. Nessus uses default routes when scanning target networks and will correctly scan a system from the
appropriate interface.