Hardware

Choosing the right hardware is an important step in planning your Gallium Cluster. This page covers system component requirements.

System Components

System Requirements

Each server in a Gallium Cluster must meet the minimum requirements listed below. The Gallium Console will prevent installation on servers that do not meet these specifications.

All hypervisors running the Worker role must have identical CPU and memory configurations. This ensures virtual machines can be live migrated and failed over between any Worker hypervisor in the cluster.

System Disk

Each server requires a dedicated System Disk for the Gallium installation. Supported options include:

• A single SSD: 240 GB minimum, 480 GB recommended.
• A boot-optimized storage device such as the Dell BOSS, HPE NS204i-u or Cisco UCS-M2-HWRAID.

When using a single SSD redundancy is provided by total failover to another hypervisor within the cluster.

Cluster metrics are written to the system disk on each hypervisor. This can generate ~100GB per day of write activity on busy clusters. Ensure your system disk is appropriately rated for a DWPD of 0.5 or higher.

Storage Adapters

HBA (Host Bus Adapter) controllers are preferred for cluster deployments. RAID controllers are not recommended. Gallium manages disk redundancy at the software level through virtual disk copies, so hardware RAID provides no benefit and can interfere with storage operations.

RAID controllers placed in passthrough mode may still limit the hypervisor’s ability to monitor disk health. When in doubt, use purpose-built HBAs or controllers placed in IT mode.

Network Adapters

Use server-grade 10 Gbps (or better) network adapters. Intel NICs are recommended for best compatibility.

Thunderbolt and USB network adapters are excluded.

NIC Feature Requirements

Network adapters must support the following settings.

Most server-grade Intel NICs support these settings out of the box. Consumer or desktop-class adapters may not support the required ring sizes or queue counts.

Network Switches

Industry standard managed switches are sufficient. There is no requirement for special switch functionality.

For redundancy, deploy an A-side and B-side switch. Each server’s network adapters should be distributed across both switches so that a single switch failure does not take the cluster offline.

The link between the A and B switches should be sized at the infrastructure NIC speed multiplied by N-1, where N is the number of servers. This ensures sufficient bandwidth when servers on opposite switches need to communicate. For example, a Three Hypervisor cluster with 10 Gbps infrastructure NICs requires a 20 Gbps inter-switch link.

Disks

The following disk types are supported:

• Enterprise SSD and NVMe drives
• SSD and NVMe drives with DRAM cache

The following disk types may be used in additional disk pools for virtual disks that are written to infrequently, such as file servers. They should not be used for VM boot volumes:

• Nearline SAS HDDs
• Server/NAS SATA HDDs

The following disk types are excluded:

• DRAMless SSDs
• SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) HDDs
• Desktop and consumer-grade HDDs

Additional Considerations

When selecting servers for your cluster, consider the following:

• Remote management: Servers with out-of-band management interfaces (iLO, iDRAC, or similar IPMI) make installation and ongoing maintenance significantly easier, especially for headless or remote deployments.
• Network adapter count: A cluster requires a minimum of 4 network adapters per server (2 for infrastructure, 2 for VM networking). Ensure your servers have enough NIC ports or expansion slots.
• Disk capacity: Plan for both the boot device and additional data disks for VM storage. More disk slots allow for greater storage flexibility and capacity.

Support Policy

Gallium’s hardware support tiers, support life, and Extended Support program are described in the Support Policy.