2.2. Hardware Requirements

The following table shows the required and recommended hardware configurations on the x86 and x86_64 platform for the two types of RHN Satellite:

Beyond the space needed for Red Hat Enterprise Linux installation and /var/satellite/, you also need space for cache files generated when using Satellite, which get regenerated, as needed, if deleted. These cache files are stored within /var/cache/rhn, and the storage needs of this directory will vary greatly depending on the following factors:

As a guide, provide at least 10 GB of space for /var/cache/rhn/ on a Satellite server. For very large Satellite deployments with numerous channels, packages, and using Inter Satellite Sync, your usage could grow to as much as 100 GB of space for cache files in /var/cache/rhn.

The following hardware configuration is required for the Stand-Alone Database:

See Section 2.3, “Database Requirements” for instructions on estimating the tablespace of the database and setting its environment variables.

Keep in mind, the frequency with which client systems connect to the Satellite is directly related to load on the Apache Web server and the database. Reducing the default interval of four hours (or 240 minutes) as set in the /etc/sysconfig/rhn/rhnsd configuration file of the client systems significantly increases the load on those components.