System Requirements

Below are our recommended and supported system requirements for running TrueCharts Charts inside a Talos VM atop a TrueNAS SCALE or other hypervisor (Proxmox, UnRaid, etc.) host system. These are early, preliminary system requirements and will likely change in the future as we gather feedback from more migrated users.

See below for additional information.

Note

Whilst system requirements for Talos on bare metal are inherently much lower due to much less overhead compared to running in a Virtual Machine, we do not currently support running Talos as a bare-metal OS

Recommended System Specifications for Master-only Nodes

Systems complying with these specifications are suitable for deployment as a master node only, and as such, have lower requirements than those used further down the page. This allows for deployment on platforms that are much more compute-starved.

CPU: 4 Physical Cores, suitable for deployment on ARM environments such as a Raspberry Pi v4, v5, etc.

RAM: 8GB or more

Storage: SSD or alternatively a high-end, write-durable SD card such as a Samsung Pro Plus or Pro Ultimate, SanDisk Extreme Pro or High/Max Endurance and equivalents.

Minimum System Specifications

Systems complying with these minimum specifications will be able to run some of our apps and may be limited to just a few at the same time. Experiences in terms of performance and which apps work may vary.

CPU: 6 Physical Cores of AMD Ryzen or Intel 8th Gen Core or better families

• 4 Cores allocated to the Talos VM
• 2 Cores remaining for the host system, e.g. SCALE

RAM: 24GB or more

• Minimum 16GB allocated to Talos VM

GPU: None

VM Disk Storage: HDD

• 1x sparsely allocated disk of minimum 256GB size
• 1x sparsely allocated disk of minimum 768GB size

Example Minimum Spec System

CPU: AMD Ryzen 3600 or Intel Core i7 8700

RAM: 32GB

VM Disk Storage: 1TB HDD

GPU: Intel iGPU

Recommended System Specifications

Systems complying with these recommended specifications will likely be able to run any Chart we offer, and likely many at the same time, depending on system load and the specific Charts in deployment.

CPU: 8+ Physical Cores of AMD Ryzen or Intel 8th Gen Core or better families

• 6+ Cores allocated to the Talos VM
• 2+ Cores remaining for the host system, e.g. SCALE

RAM: 48GB or more

• 32GB or more allocated to Talos VM

GPU: Intel iGPU, or dedicated Nvidia GPU (AMD GPUs may work but are not guaranteed)

VM Disk Storage: SSD

• 1x sparsely allocated disk of minimum 256GB size
• 1x sparsely allocated disk of minimum 768GB size

Example Recommended Spec System

CPU: AMD Ryzen 5700X

RAM: 64GB

VM Disk Storage: 1TB SSD

GPU: Dedicated Nvidia GPU

Notes

VM Creation Instructions

On the left of this page in the sidebar, under this page and in the virtual-machines section, you will see links to creating the Talos VM on various types of host systems including TrueNAS SCALE, Proxmox and more.

Best Effort CPU Recommendations

We obviously cannot account for all possible system configurations on the planet. Please use some common sense when determining if your hardware may or may not be suitable for running a Talos VM for our apps. Aside from our below recommendations, the most generic advice we can give is to use a CPU that is at least of the x86-64 v3 baseline.

These include, but are not limited to

• Intel Haswell family CPUs
• Intel Gracemont family Atom CPUs (specifically only the N300/N305)
• AMD Ryzen family CPUs

Here is a link to PassMark CPU score comparisons of our minimum and recommended CPUs. You can add your own CPU to the comparison table to determine your equivalent standing. In short, you want your CPU to be scoring higher than the minimum.

RAM Recommendations

16GB of RAM allocated to the Talos VM is a hard bare-minimum recommendation by us. Users running a Talos VM with less than 16GB of RAM allocated to it may incur performance issues, and may be excluded from support. RAM requirements for your VM will obviously increase as you deploy more charts.

Storage Recommendations

The file created on your host’s storage device to be used by the VM is almost always a single continuous file. So whilst an SSD will obviously greatly improve the speed at which this file can be accessed by the VM, a HDD is adequate.

Additionally, the storage backend we are using on Talos requires the presence of two separate “disks” to be presented to the Talos VM. As noted above however, these are sparsely allocated. This means that whilst you’d want to have the entirety of the space able to be occupied available, it will not all be used immediately.

For example: A 512GB “sparsely allocated” disk for the Talos VM, housed on a 1TB disk in the host system, will not immediately/always take up 512GB of space. 512GB is the maximum amount of space the file could occupy if needed.

GPU Recommendations

Unfortunately, AMD (i)GPUs continue to be rather lacklustre in the Kubernetes world. AMD GPUs are supposed to work under Kubernetes, but suffer limitations such as only being able to be used by 1 app/chart at a time, which makes them hard to recommend.

Nvidia, and to some extent Intel, GPUs by comparison will almost always work “out of the box”.

SCALE VM Host Caveats

Users running the Talos VM atop a TrueNAS SCALE host system that want to also take advantage of GPU passthrough to the VM will require a minimum of 2 different GPUs to be present in the system.

The GPU desired to be passed through to the Talos VM will need to be isolated within SCALE.

This could include any of the following combinations:

GPU1: Dedicated Nvidia GPU isolated within SCALE for VM passthrough

GPU2: Intel/AMD iGPU

or

GPU1: Motherboard IPMI GPU

GPU2: Intel iGPU or dedicated Nvidia GPU isolated within SCALE for VM passthrough