One of BigFix design goals is to require minimal hardware to avoid complexity and to keep costs low. However, the performance of the hardware of the BigFix Server will greatly affect how fast you can send commands to and get information from the agents as well as the overall user-experience for the console operators.

 

BigFix Server Hardware Recommendations

The values listed below are recommended hardware specifications that will provide good performance for similar sized deployments of BigFix. If your deployment will have over 100 BigFix Console Operators you should consider raising your hardware specifications to the next higher scale to support the large number of users or contact Bigfix Technical Support for more help in selecting hardware.

For best performance, use the following recommendations:

Deployment Size CPU Memory Hard Disks
< 250 2-3 GHz 2 GB Standard HD
1,000 2-3 GHz - 2 Cores 4 GB 1 RAID Array (RAID 10, 5)
10,000 2-3 GHz - 2-4 Cores 8 GB 1-2 RAID Arrays (RAID 10)
50,000 2-3 GHz - 4 Cores 16 GB 2 RAID Arrays (RAID 10)
100,000 2-3 GHz - 4-8 Cores 16-32 GB 2 RAID Arrays (RAID 10)
> 200,000 2-3+ GHz - 8-16 Cores 32-64 GB 3 RAID Arrays (RAID 10)

Note: RAID arrays must support using the disk cache for both reading and writing. The disk cache should be set to 50/50 read write.

RAID Configurations

See Recommended RAID Configurations for more information.

Disk Space Requirements

The Hard Disk configurations listed above are focused on providing high performance disks for the database and BigFix Server. The physical capacity needed for BigFix is generally considered very small. A minimum of 5 GB free disk space is needed by the database, data files, and the file caches to run BigFix. It is recommended that an additional 20-50 GB of disk space be available for flexibility for administrative tasks like database backups and to allow for growth.

Multiple RAID arrays normally provide more than enough disk space for BigFix so capacity concerns aren't common.

Network Card Specifications

The BigFix Server is the central communication hub of a BigFix deployment and should be positioned in a data center with a high-speed network connection.

BigFix Server network speed recommendations:

For deployments over 25,000 seats, please consider using teamed network cards or 1 GB connections to provide optimal network throughput for the BigFix Server.

Message Level Encryption

In BigFix 7.1 and up, you can enable a feature to encrypt BigFix Client reports. The BigFix Server and BigFix Relay infrastructure will need to use additional CPU resources to decrypt these documents. If you anticipate use of the message level encryption feature, BigFix recommends adding additional CPU cores or higher powered cores on the BigFix Server.

Note: If your deployment is over 50,000 seats or you are using an encryption key strength of 2048 or 4096 you should also create decrypting top level BigFix Relays with 2-4 CPU cores each

.