Booting from USB or CD-ROM

Nodes should support booting from a USB 2.0-based flash key. For security, only use a USB key that has a physical write-protected switch (e.g., Imation Pivot Flash, TwinMOS Mobile Disk Z4, or other). However, if your system does not support USB booting or you cannot find a write-protect USB, then as a minimum it must also have a CD-ROM drive that supports bootable CDs.

Minimum Hardware Requirements

Nodes must meet minimum PCU, CPU, RAM, and storage requirements:

PCU	Built-in, remote-access power-reset capability, accessible from PLE, such as IntelAMT, HPiLO, DellRAC, IPMIv2, etc.
CPU	Multi-Core 64bit Intel compatible CPU(s) Minimum requirement: Intel Xeon E3/E5 2+ cores Suggested: Intel Xeon E5/E7 8+ cores
RAM	16GB Suggested: 32GB or more
Storage	1TB+ of total disk storage Minimum requirement: 500GB Suggested disk capacity: 2TB or more Optional: RAID configuration
Note: Linux KVM virtual machines are also supported provided they meet the specs

At least two nodes must meet the configurations mentioned in the table above. More are better. If you do not know whether your hardware meets the minimum requirements, or whether it is supported by Linux, we strongly recommend purchasing one of the known working hardware configurations listed below: