Installation Options

Bare Metal

Deploy directly on dedicated physical servers for maximum performance and lowest latency.

• Sensor: Multi-core Intel Xeon 6 Performance series, 128 GB–4 TB RAM, BOSS-N2 boot RAID 1 (OS separation), high-speed NICs with large ring buffers and RSS.

• Manager: Similar CPU/RAM but optimized for storage (RAID 10 NVMe).

• Installation process: Official ISO → automated Ansible playbooks (ndr-sensor-install, ndr-manager-install) that configure AF_PACKET threading, CPU affinity, hugepages, and systemd services. Post-install tuning scripts validate 0% packet loss.

Virtualized Deployment

Supported hypervisors: VMware ESXi 8.x (SR-IOV strongly recommended), KVM/libvirt, Microsoft Hyper-V, Nutanix AHV.

• Sensor VM: Dedicated passthrough or SR-IOV NICs, CPU pinning, NUMA alignment, 1 GB hugepages, and AF_PACKET in cluster_flow mode.

• Manager VM: Standard vCPU/memory.

• Identical performance to bare metal when properly tuned.

Turnkey Appliances

Pre-built 1U/2U Dell PowerEdge servers with factory-optimized BIOS, firmware, drivers, and BOSS-N2 boot storage.

• Available performance tiers: 100Mb, 1Gb, 10Gb, 20Gb, 40Gb, 100Gb (detailed in Section 5).

• Factory imaging includes Suricata 8.0, Manager or Sensor software, and all performance tuning.

• Simplest deployment path for customers requiring guaranteed 0% packet loss.