Clustering System Requirements
The following are system requirements for the parent node and child nodes. These estimations assume that the KB and audit trail settings are disabled. If those settings are enabled, the size required can significantly increase. In these cases, Tenable recommends increasing the standard system requirements by at least 50%.
Caution: Tenable highly recommends not using shared resources in Tenable Nessus clustering environments. Doing so can cause significant performance issues.
Parent Node (Tenable Nessus Manager with Clustering Enabled)
Tenable supports connecting up to 20,000 agents per one Tenable Nessus Manager child node.
Note: The amount of disk space needed depends on how many agent scan results you keep and for how long. For example, if you run a single 5,000 agent scan result once per day and keep scan results for seven days, the estimated disk space used is 35 GB. The disk space required per scan result varies based on the consistency, number, and types of vulnerabilities detected.
- Disk: Estimated minimum of 5 GB per 5,000 agents per scan per day
- CPU: 8 core minimum for all implementations, with an additional 8 cores for every three child nodes
- RAM: 16 GB minimum for all implementations, with an additional 4 GB for every additional child node
Child Node (Tenable Nessus Scanner Managed by Tenable Nessus Manager Parent Node)
Note: Disk space is used to store agent scan results temporarily, both individual and combined, before uploading the results to the parent node.
Child node with 0-10,000 agents:
- Disk: Estimated minimum of 5 GB per 5,000 agents per concurrent scan.
- CPU: 4 cores
- RAM: 16 GB
Child node with 10,000-20,000 agents:
A child node can support a maximum of 20,000 agents.
- Disk: Estimated minimum of 5 GB per 5,000 agents per concurrent scan.
- CPU: 8 cores
- RAM: 32 GB
Agents
Linked agents must be on a supported Tenable Nessus Agent version.