Operating system configuration task overview

This topic provides a high-level overview of the OS settings required for Vertica.

This topic provides a high-level overview of the OS settings required for Vertica. Each item provides a link to additional details about the setting and detailed steps on making the configuration change. The installer tests for all of these settings and provides hints, warnings, and failures if the current configuration does not meet Vertica requirements.

Before you install the operating system

Configuration Description
Supported Platforms Verify that your servers meet the platform requirements described in Supported Platforms. Unsupported operating systems are detected by the installer.
LVM Vertica Analytic Database supports Linux Volume Manager (LVM) on all supported operating systems. For information on LVM requirements and restrictions, see the section, Vertica Support for LVM.
File system

Choose the storage format type based on deployment requirements. Vertica recommends the following storage format types where applicable:

  • ext3

  • ext4

  • NFS for backup

  • XFS

  • Amazon S3 Standard for communal storage and related backup tasks when running in Eon Mode

The storage format type at your backup and temporary directory locations must support fcntl lockf (POSIX) file locking.

Swap Space A 2GB swap partition is required. Partition the remaining disk space in a single partition under "/".
Disk Block Size The disk block size for the Vertica data and catalog directories should be 4096 bytes, the default for ext4 file systems.
Memory For more information on sizing your hardware, see the Vertica Hardware Planning Guide.

Firewall considerations

Configuration Description
Firewall/Ports Firewalls, if present, must be configured so as not to interfere with Vertica.

General operating system configuration - automatically configured by installer

These general OS settings are automatically made by the installer if they do not meet Vertica requirements. You can prevent the installer from automatically making these configuration changes by using the --no-system-configuration parameter for the install_vertica script.

Configuration Description
Nice Limits The database administration user must be able to nice processes back to the default level of 0.
min_free_kbytes The vm.min_free_kbytes setting in /etc/sysctl.conf must be configured sufficiently high. The specific value depends on your hardware configuration.
User Open Files Limit The open file limit for the dbadmin user should be at least 1 file open per MB of RAM, 65536, or the amount of RAM in MB; whichever is greater.
System Open File Limits The maximum number of files open on the system must not be less than at least the amount of memory in MB, but not less than 65536.
Pam Limits

/etc/pam.d/su must contain the line:
session required pam_limits.so

This allows for the conveying of limits to commands run with the su - command.

Address Space Limits The address space limits (as setting) defined in /etc/security/limits.conf must be unlimited for the database administrator.
File Size Limits The file sizelimits (fsize setting) defined in /etc/security/limits.conf must be unlimited for the database administrator.
User Process Limits The nproc setting defined in /etc/security/limits.conf must be 1024 or the amount of memory in MB, whichever is greater.
Maximum Memory Maps The vm.max_map_count in /etc/sysctl.conf must be 65536 or the amount of memory in KB / 16, whichever is greater.

General operating system configuration - manual configuration

The following general OS settings must be done manually.

Configuration Description
Disk Readahead This disk readahead must be at least 2048, with a high of 8192. Set this high limit only with the help of Vertica support. The specific value depends on your hardware configuration.
NTP Services The NTP daemon must be enabled and running, with the exception of Red Hat 7 and CentOS 7 systems.
chrony For Red Hat 7 and CentOS 7 systems, chrony must be enabled and running.
SELinux SElinux must be disabled or run in permissive mode.
CPU Frequency Scaling

Vertica recommends that you disable CPU Frequency Scaling.

Transparent Hugepages

For Red Hat 7, CentOS 7 and Amazon Linux 2.0, Transparent Hugepages must be set to always.

For all other operating systems, Transparent Hugepages must be disabled or set to madvise.

I/O Scheduler The I/O Scheduler for disks used by Vertica must be set to deadline or noop.
Support Tools Several optional packages can be installed to assist Vertica support when troubleshooting your system.

System user requirements

The following tasks pertain to the configuration of the system user required by Vertica.

Configuration Required Setting(s)
System User Requirements The installer automatically creates a user with the correct settings. If you specify a user with --dba-user, then the user must conform to the requirements for the Vertica system user.
LANG Environment Settings The LANG environment variable must be set and valid for the database administration user.
TZ Environment Settings The TZ environment variable must be set and valid for the database administration user.

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