Platform requirements and recommendations

• 1: General hardware and OS requirements and recommendations
• 2: BASH shell requirements

1 - General hardware and OS requirements and recommendations

Hardware recommendations

The Vertica Analytics Platform is based on a massively parallel processing (MPP), shared-nothing architecture, in which the query processing workload is divided among all nodes of the Vertica database. OpenText highly recommends using a homogeneous hardware configuration for your Vertica cluster; that is, each node of the cluster should be similar in CPU, clock speed, number of cores, memory, and operating system version.

Note that OpenText has not tested Vertica on clusters made up of nodes with disparate hardware specifications. While it is expected that a Vertica database would functionally work in a mixed hardware configuration, performance will be limited to that of the slowest node in the cluster.

Vertica performs best on processors with higher clock frequency. When possible, choose a faster processor with fewer cores as opposed to a slower processor with more cores.

Tests performed both internally and by customers have shown performance differences between processor architectures even when accounting for differences in core count and clock frequency. When possible, compare platforms by installing Vertica and running experiments using your data and workloads. Consider testing on cloud platforms that offer VMs running on different processor architectures, even if you intend to deploy your Vertica database on premises.

Detailed hardware recommendations are available in Recommendations for Sizing Vertica Nodes and Clusters (formerly the Vertica Hardware Planning Guide).

Platform OS requirements

You must verify that your servers meet the platform requirements described in Vertica server and Management Console.

Verify sudo

Vertica uses the sudo command during installation and some administrative tasks. Ensure that sudo is available on all hosts with the following command:

# which sudo
/usr/bin/sudo

If sudo is not installed, on all hosts, follow the instructions in How to Enable sudo on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

When you use sudo to install Vertica, the user that performs the installation must have privileges on all nodes in the cluster.

Configuring sudo with privileges for the individual commands can be a tedious and error-prone process; thus, the Vertica documentation does not include every possible sudo command that you can include in the sudoers file. Instead, Vertica recommends that you temporarily elevate the sudo user to have all privileges for the duration of the install.

To allow root sudo access on all commands as any user on any machine, use visudo as root to edit the /etc/sudoers file and add this line:

## Allow root to run any commands anywhere
root   ALL=(ALL) ALL

After the installation completes, remove (or reset) sudo privileges to the pre-installation settings.

2 - BASH shell requirements

All shell scripts included in Vertica must run under the BASH shell. If you are on a Debian system, then the default shell can be DASH. DASH is not supported. Change the shell for root and for the dbadmin user to BASH with the chsh command.

For example:

# getent passwd | grep root
root:x:0:0:root:/root:/bin/dash

# chsh
Changing shell for root.
New shell [/bin/dash]: /bin/bash
Shell changed.

Then, as root, change the symbolic link for /bin/sh from /bin/dash to /bin/bash:

# rm /bin/sh
# ln -s /bin/bash /bin/sh

Log out and back in for the change to take effect.