Preparing the installation environment

Before installing Vertica, you must configure your environment.

To run Vertica Enterprise on-premises, follow the numbered instructions below.

To run the Vertica in a Virtual Machine instead, see Vertica community edition (CE).

Copy the installation file to your home directory. The example shows an rpm file for CentOS/RHEL, but you may have a deb file for Debian.
```
$ scp vertica-version.RHEL8.x86_64.rpm /~
```
Identify the IP address of the current node.
```
$ ipconfig -a
```
If the ipconfig command is not found in your path, you can try running it directly using the paths /sbin/ipconfig or /usr/sbin/ipconfig. If neither of those work, use the ip command:
```
$ ip a
```
Note
The previous commands can return multiple addresses. For example, if your system is configured to use both IPv4 and IPv6 addressing, the commands will list two addresses, one for each address family. In this case, you must determine which address you want to use.
Ensure your packages are up to date. Run the command based on your distribution.

On CentOS and RedHat:
```
$ sudo yum update -y
```
On openSUSE:
```
$ sudo zypper up
```
On Debian and Ubuntu:
```
$ sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade
```
Set swappiness to 0 (recommended).
```
$ sudo systemctl vm.swappiness=0
```
Verify that SELinux is running in permissive mode or is disabled.
```
$ sudo setenforce 0
```

Disable the system firewall.

$ sudo systemctl mask firewalld
$ sudo systemctl disable firewalld
$ sudo systemctl stop firewalld