2.2. Hardware Requirements
Use the following guidelines to determine if your hardware is suitable for a Satellite Proxy installation:
- A Pentium IV Processor or equivalent.
- At least 2 GB of memory. 4 GB of memory recommended.
- At least 5 GB of storage for a base installation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
- 6 GB of storage per architecture per release.The caching mechanism used by Satellite Proxy is the Squid HTTP proxy, which saves significant bandwidth for the clients. Cached packages are stored in the
/var/spool/squiddirectory. The more disk space that the cache has available, the less likely it is to remove RPM files before they have expired. Providing less than the recommended storage reduces the performance enhancements offered by using the Proxy server.
Satellite Proxy 5.8 features the ability to precache entire channels. Using this feature requires significant disk space; Red Hat recommends at least 20 GB per base channel. Refer to the hardware guidelines in the Red Hat Satellite Installation Guide in you intend to use this feature. Proxy precaching is discussed in Section 4.2, “Configuring Proxy Precaching”.
If the Satellite Proxy is configured to distribute custom, or local packages, make sure that the
/var mount point on the system storing local packages has sufficient disk space to hold all of the custom packages, which are stored in /var/spool/rhn-proxy. The required disk space for local packages depends on the number of custom packages served.
The load on the Apache Web server is directly related to the frequency with which client systems connect to the Satellite Proxy. If the default interval of four hours (or 240 minutes) is reduced, the load on this component increases significantly. This value is set in the
/etc/sysconfig/rhn/rhnsd configuration file of each client system.
Note
The installation procedure optimizes the caching abilities for the available resources. Provide more memory and disk space prior to installation to increase active caching within Red Hat Satellite Proxy.
