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This page lists the system requirements to run Petals ESB.
This list is related to the Petals container, that is to say the server itself. Petals components (functional extensions) or tools may have additional or specific requirements.

As a reminder, Petals ESB is standalone, distributed server.

The following operating systems are supported:
* Linux Debian-based (e.g. Debian, Ubuntu)
* Red Hat (RHEL, CentOS)

Although Petals ESB runs on Windows and MacOS, these operating systems are neither recommended nor supported in production environments.

h1. Java

You must have installed a Java Development Kit (JDK) on your operating system before before proceeding with a Petals ESB installation.
A Java Runtime Environment (JRE) is not suitable.

Sun/Oracle JDK for Java 1.6 is the only JDK supported (no specific version).

All the ports declared within the *topology.xml* file must be opened between Petals server instances.
In addition, JMX ports must be accessible for administrators machines.

Besides, Petals components may require to open more ports (example: the SOAP component).

h1. Petals ESB hardware requirements

Only x86 hardware and 64-bit derivatives of x86 hardware are supported with Petals ESB.
Server load depends primarily on the number of requests per second on the bus.

*Production use, light to medium server load :*
* Dual 2 GHz\+ CPU Xeon or equivalent
* 2 GB of RAM for Petals
* 1.000 Mbits/s network interface
* 500 MB of disk for Petals

*Production use, heavy load :*
* Quad 2GHz\+ CPU Xeon or equivalent
* 4 GB of RAM for Petals
* 1.000 to 10.000 Mbits/s network interface
* 500 MB of disk for Petals

Notice that in a distributed mode, Petals nodes perform a lot of exchanges with other nodes.
The network is therefore highly solicited.

Petals ESB requires few disk space, unless you use advanced logging to monitor flows.
In this case, you should have a disk partition dedicated to the logs.

Petals ESB does not require to back up any data.
If a node crashes, you can simply reinstall it over another machine (with the same network configuration).
However, to minimize the impact of a crash, one can use a RAID configuration. This solution avoids a full reinstallation.

Petals ESB runs over virtualized environments.