Abstract
How much RAM, Disk, and CPU are needed for a Cloud Foundry deployment? We believe you need this much at a minimum:
- 46GB RAM
- 2 cores (they don’t need to be fast) (hyperthreading doesn’t count)
- 466GB disk
Requirements increase as you add additional services (e.g. MySQL, GemFire, Hadoop, RabbitMQ, etc…)
Disclaimers
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Refer to the official Cloud Foundry documentation for hardware requirements. Our intent is primarily to describe what we’ve seen in day-to-day usage.
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These are not production deployments. They typically are built and torn down fairly quickly and are only there to run tests. They are fairly minimal and are representative of development deployments only.
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Our production instance, Pivotal Web Services, is much larger than any environment described here.
Background
We are on a team that maintains the Cloud Foundry development environments that run on VMware vSphere. We wrote a script which breaks down the disk/RAM/CPU usage of each Cloud Foundry deployment (each deployment runs in its own resource pool). We ran our script against a dozen of the development environments and determined the following hardware usage:
Resource Pool Disk (GB) RAM (GiB) VMs
crane 466 46 27
poodle 595 54 28
gopher 597 54 29
hamster 614 67 33
leopard 623 58 32
lobster 628 60 36
giraffe 639 60 34
donkey 682 70 36
fox 737 61 30
badger 740 61 30
duck 790 72 31
croc 807 88 43
lion 870 117 68
koala 901 222 60
eagle 912 103 54
camel 941 87 45
bonobo 1039 143 70
bear 1167 86 56
deer 1235 65 43
Average 789 83 41
Std Deviation 206.0 41.6 13.8
The spreadsheet detailing the information can be seen here.
RAM
Cloud Foundry can be deployed as little as 46GiB of RAM; however, the average deployment size is 83GiB with standard deviation of 41GiB. Upshot: 64GiB is good for small deployments, 128GiB would handle all but two of our deployments.
CPU
We need but two physical cores. Cloud Foundry a surprisingly low CPU burden (one member of my team deployed Cloud Foundry on an environment with only 2 cores!).
We do need more than one core because vSphere 5.5’s Virtual CPU limit is 32 Virtual CPUs per core, and Cloud Foundry deployments require more than 32 virtual CPUs.
Unfortunately the RAM requirements exceed Intel’s Haswell ceiling (32GiB), which means that Cloud Foundry deployments are typically done on Xeons (but not the 12xx line, which, like the Haswells, has a 32GiB limit).
Intel has an interesting low-end chipset, the Avoton C2750, an eight-core chip which can address 64GiB of RAM. We would be curious to hear of the experience of anyone who installs Cloud Foundry on an Avoton-based system.
Disk
The smallest deployment in our development environment uses 466GB of hard disk space. Most of our deployments use less than 1TB of hard disk storage.
The average deployment uses 789GB of hard disk space with a relatively tight standard deviation of 206GB.
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