General

Do I need to buy additional storage hardware for Parallels Cloud Storage?

No. Parallels Cloud Storage eliminates the need for external storage devices typically used in SANs by converting locally attached storage from multiple nodes into a shared storage.

What are the hardware requirements for Parallels Cloud Storage?

Parallels Cloud Storage does not require any special hardware and can run on commodity computers with traditional SATA drives and 1 GbE networks. Some hard drives and RAID controllers, however, ignore the FLUSH command to imitate better performance and must not be used in clusters as this may lead to file system or journal corruptions. This is especially true for RAID controllers and SSD drives. Please consult with your hard drive's manual to make sure you use reliable hardware.

For more information, see System Requirements , Network Requirements , Hardware RAID Controller and Disk Write Caches .

How many servers do I need to run a Parallels Cloud Storage cluster?

You need only one physical server to start using Parallels Cloud Storage. However, to provide high availability for your data, you are recommended to configure your cluster to have at least 3 replicas per each data chunk. This requires at least 3 online servers—and at least 5 servers in total—in to be set up in the cluster. For details, see Parallels Cloud Storage Configurations and Configuring Replication Parameters .

Can I join Hardware Nodes running different supported operating systems into a single Parallels Cloud Storage cluster?

Yes. You can create Parallels Cloud Storage clusters of Hardware Nodes running any combination of supported operating systems. For example, you can have metadata servers on Hardware Nodes with Ubuntu 14.04, chunk servers on Hardware Nodes with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, and clients on computers with CentOS 7.

Note: The current standalone version of Parallels Cloud Storage does not support Parallels Cloud Server.