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Data Infrastructure Insights

Acquisition Unit Requirements

Contributors netapp-alavoie netapp-chunge
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You must install an Acquisition Unit (AU) in order to acquire information from your infrastructure data collectors (storage, VM, port, EC2, etc.). Before you install the Acquisition Unit, you should ensure that your environment meets operating system, CPU, memory, and disk space requirements.

Requirements

Component

Linux Requirement

Windows Requirement

Operating system

A computer running a licensed version of one of the following:

* Centos (64-bit): 7.2 through 7.9, 8.1 through 8.4, Stream 8, Stream 9
* AlmaLinux 9.3 and 9.4
* Debian (64-bit): 9 and 10
* OpenSUSE Leap 15.1 through 15.5
* Oracle Enterprise Linux (64-bit): 7.5 through 7.9, 8.1 through 8.8
* Red Hat Enterprise Linux (64-bit): 7.2 through 7.9, 8.1 through 8.10, 9.1 through 9.4
* Rocky 9.0 through 9.4
* SUSE Enterprise Linux Server 15, 15 SP2 through 15 SP5
* Ubuntu Server: 18.04, 20.04, 22.04 LTS
* SELinux on the above platforms

This computer should be running no other application-level software. A dedicated server is recommended.

If you are running with SELinux, it is recommended to execute the following commands on the acquisition unit system:

sudo semanage fcontext -a -t usr_t "/opt/netapp/cloudinsights(/.*)?"
sudo restorecon -R /opt/netapp/cloudinsights

A computer running a licensed version of one of the following:

* Microsoft Windows 10 64-bit
* Microsoft Windows Server 2012
* Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2
* Microsoft Windows Server 2016
* Microsoft Windows Server 2019
* Microsoft Windows Server 2022
* Microsoft Windows 11


This computer should be running no other application-level software. A dedicated server is recommended.

CPU

2 CPU cores

Same

Memory

8 GB RAM

Same

Available disk space

50 GB (100 GB recommended)
For Linux, disk space should be allocated in this manner:
/opt/netapp 10 GB (20 GB for large environments)
/var/log/netapp 40 GB (80 GB for large environments)
/tmp at least 1 GB available during installation

50 GB

Network

100 Mbps/1 Gbps Ethernet connection, static IP address, and port 80 or 443 (outbound) connectivity from Acquisition Unit to *.cloudinsights.netapp.com or your Data Infrastructure Insights environment (i.e. https://<environment_id>.c01.cloudinsights.netapp.com) is required. For requirements between Acquisition Unit and each Data Collector, please refer to instructions for the Data Collector.

If your organization requires proxy usage for internet access, you may need to understand your organization’s proxy behavior and seek certain exceptions for Data Infrastructure Insights to work. For example, does your organization block access by default, and only allow access to specific web sites/domains by exception? If so, you will need to get the following domain added to the exception list:

*.cloudinsights.netapp.com

For more information, read about Proxies here (Linux) or here (Windows).

Same

Permissions

Sudo permissions on the Acquisition Unit server.
/tmp must be mounted with exec capabilities.

Administrator permissions on the Acquisition Unit server

Virus Scan

During installation, you must completely disable all virus scanners. Following installation, the paths used by the Acquisition Unit software must be excluded from virus scanning.

Additional recommendations

  • For accurate audit and data reporting, it is strongly recommended to synchronize the time on the Acquisition Unit machine using Network Time Protocol (NTP) or Simple Network Time Protocol (SNTP).

Regarding Sizing

You can get started with a Data Infrastructure Insights Acquisition Unit with just 8GB memory and 50GB of disk space, however, for larger environments you should ask yourself the following questions:

Do you expect to:

  • Discover more than 2500 virtual machines or 10 large (> 2 node) ONTAP clusters, Symmetrix, or HDS/HPE VSP/XP arrays on this Acquisition Unit?

  • Deploy 75 or more total data collectors on this Acquisition Unit?

For each "Yes" answer above, it is recommend to add 8 GB of memory and 50 GB of disk space to the AU. So for example if you answered "Yes" to both, you should deploy a 24GB memory system with 150GB or more of disk space. On Linux, the disk space to be added to the log location.

For additional sizing questions, contact NetApp Support.

Additional Federal Edition requirement

  • For Acquisition Unit installations in Data Infrastructure Insights Federal Edition clusters, the underlying operating system must have a good source of entropy. On Linux systems this is typically done by installing rng-tools or by using hardware random number generation (RNG). It is the customer's responsibility to ensure this requirement is met on the Acquisition Unit machine.