System Requirements

Hardware

CloudShark can run on both virtual machine (VM) and bare metal installations. Consider the rest of your infrastructure when choosing your deployment options.

All tiers must have a 64-bit (x86_64) CPU.

Minimum

  • Dual-core CPU
  • 8 GB RAM
  • 500 GB free disk space
  • Quad-core CPU or better
  • ≥ 32 GB RAM
  • 4.0 TB free disk space

Estimated Performance

Because your individual usage of CloudShark is very specific to your organization, and so much depends on the contents of the capture files as well as the number of concurrent users you have accessing CloudShark, we’ve put together the following table to give you an approximate performance level.

  Minimum Recommended 
Max File Size  Up to 200 MB  Up to 4 GB 
Number of Users  1-5 25+ 

Note on maximum capture sizes

Some analysis tools are more intensive on the CPU and disk than others and may take longer depending on the content and size of the capture file. Suggested sizes are estimates only.

Analysis is capped at what can be completed in a reasonable amount of time. To run some tools and filters against larger files, your hardware will need to be powerful enough.

Note that CloudShark’s storage requirements grow linearly with the size of the capture files stored. Many CloudShark deployments use existing SANs within an organization. For local storage, we recommend a redundant storage array and ext4 filesystem with high performance disks.

Operating System

CloudShark runs on a standard 64-bit (x86_64) Linux machine. The following operating systems are currently supported:

New installations should use the latest Rocky/RHEL 8 operating system.

All installation types, such as minimal install, full desktop install, etc. are supported. We recommend a minimal install of the latest release and all available security updates. To update the system, run the command yum upgrade.

Please note that Red Hat Enterprise Linux may require the configuration of an optional software channel to fully support all of CloudShark’s dependencies. CloudShark’s installer will generate a warning if this channel is disabled.

CloudShark on AWS EC2

See our AWS information for additional information about installing CloudShark on AWS.

Internet Access

Internet Access is not required to run or install CloudShark.