Hardware Requirements

Tenable Nessus Agents

Tenable Nessus Agents are lightweight and only minimal system resources. Generally, a Tenable Nessus Agent uses 40 MB of RAM (all pageable). A Tenable 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 Tenable Nessus Agent resource usage, see Nessus Agents Performance.

The following table outlines the minimum recommended hardware for operating a Tenable Nessus Agent. You can install Tenable Nessus Agents 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

  • Agents 7.7.x and earlier: > 1 GB, not including space used by the host operating system

  • Agents 8.0.x and later: > 3 GB, not including space used by the host operating system

  • Agents 10.0.x and later: > 2 GB, not including space used by the host operating system

The agent may require more space during certain processes, such as a plugins-code.db defragmentation operation.
Disk Speed 15-50 IOPS
Note: You can control the priority of the Tenable Nessus Agent relative to the priority of other tasks running on the system. For more information see Agent CPU Resource Control.

Tenable Nessus Manager

Scenario

Minimum Recommended Hardware

Nessus Manager with 0-10,000 agents

CPU: 4 2GHz cores

Memory: 16 GB RAM

Disk space: 5 GB per 5,000 agents per concurrent scan

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: 32 GB RAM

Disk space: 5 GB per 5,000 agents per concurrent scan

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

Note: Engage with your Tenable representative for large deployments.