Hardware Requirements

Nessus Agents

Nessus Agents are designed to be lightweight and to use only minimal system resources. Generally, a Nessus Agent uses 40 MB of RAM (all pageable). A Nessus Agent uses almost no CPU while idle, but is designed to use up to 100% of CPU when available during jobs.

For more information on Nessus Agent resource usage, see Nessus Agents Performance.

The following table outlines the minimum recommended hardware for operating a Nessus Agent. Nessus Agents can be installed on a virtual machine that meets the same requirements specified.

Hardware

Minimum Requirement

Processor

1 Dual-core CPU

Processor Speed

> 1 Ghz
RAM > 1 GB
Disk Space

> 1 GB with normal usage

> 2 GB under certain conditions, e.g. when a plugins-code.db defragmentation operation is in progress
Disk Speed 15-50 IOPS
Note: You can control the priority of the Nessus Agent relative to the priority of other tasks running on the system. For more information see Agent CPU Resource Control.

Nessus Manager

Scenario

Minimum Recommended Hardware

Nessus Manager with 0-10,000 agents

CPU: 4 2GHz cores

Memory: 16 GB RAM

Disk space: 30 GB, not including space used by the host operating system.

Note: Scan results and plugin updates require more disk space over time.

Nessus Manager with 10,001-20,000 agents

 

CPU: 8 2GHz cores

Memory: 64 GB RAM

Disk space: 30 GB, not including space used by the host operating system.

Note: Scan results and plugin updates require more disk space over time.

Note: Engage with your Tenable representative for large deployments.