Hardware Requirements for Sensei

Wow! It’s been almost like 4 weeks and we’ve already reached our target number of beta test users. It was an awesome experience to see that much interest from the community. Many thanks for that. We’re grateful.

During this time, we received emails asking us how to properly do the sizing for the hardware the Sensei plugin is running on.

It’s important to note: because of the nature of packet analysis and granular drill-down reporting, a firewall with Sensei will be more demanding than a standard OPNsense installation.

We’ve been reported that Sensei was successfully deployed and used in environments with up to 850 users and with 300 Mbps Uplink.

We’d like to share our recommendations for Minimum Hardware Specifications for running Sensei plugin on OPNsense firewall.

CPU & Memory

Number of Users	WAN Bandwidth	Recommended Minimum Memory	Recommended Minimum CPU Configuration
0-25	20 Mbps	8 GB	Intel Dual-Core i3 2.0 GHz(4 threads) or equivalent
25-50	50 Mbps10 Kpps	8 GB	Intel Dual-Core i5 2.0 GHz(4 threads) or equivalent
50-100	100 Mbps20 Kpps	16 GB	Intel Dual-Core i5 2.20 GHz(4 threads) or equivalent
100-250	200 Mbps40 Kpps	32 GB	Intel Dual-Core i7 2.0 GHz(4 threads) or equivalent
250-1000	500 Mbps100 Kpps	64 GB	Intel Dual-Core i7 3.4 GHz(8 threads) or equivalent

Disk Space

Sensei streams its connections logs to a backend Elastic Search Database. Please spare at least 5MB of disk space per hour per megabit/second throughput.

Do the math. If you’re running a 100 Mbps link (200-300 users) which is quite active during day time and idle rest of the day, this means:

5MByte x 12 hours x 100 Mbps = 6 GB per day.

6 GB x 7 = 42 GB per week.

42 x 4 = 164 GB per month.

As of 0.7.0, Sensei will have Data Retiring feature. So after a configured timespan, existing reports data will be automatically deleted, saving space for more current data.

SHARE your experience

Please share your experience with us. Just shoot an email to: [email protected]