open-nomad/website/source/docs/cluster/requirements.html.md

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---
layout: "docs"
page_title: "Nomad Client and Server Requirements"
sidebar_current: "docs-cluster-requirements"
description: |-
Learn how to manually bootstrap a Nomad cluster using the server-join
command. This section also discusses Nomad federation across multiple
datacenters and regions.
---
# Cluster Requirements
## Resources (RAM, CPU, etc.)
**Nomad servers** may need to be run on large machine instances. We suggest
having 8+ cores, 32 GB+ of memory, 80 GB+ of disk and significant network
bandwidth. The core count and network recommendations are to ensure high
throughput as Nomad heavily relies on network communication and as the Servers
are managing all the nodes in the region and performing scheduling. The memory
and disk requirements are due to the fact that Nomad stores all state in memory
and will store two snapshots of this data onto disk. Thus disk should be at
least 2 times the memory available to the server when deploying a high load
cluster.
**Nomad clients** support reserving resources on the node that should not be
used by Nomad. This should be used to target a specific resource utilization per
node and to reserve resources for applications running outside of Nomad's
supervision such as Consul and the operating system itself.
Please see the [reservation configuration](/docs/agent/config.html#reserved) for
more detail.
## Network Topology
**Nomad servers** are expected to have sub 10 millisecond network latencies
between each other to ensure liveness and high throughput scheduling. Nomad
servers can be spread across multiple datacenters if they have low latency
connections between them to achieve high availability.
For example, on AWS every region comprises of multiple zones which have very low
latency links between them, so every zone can be modeled as a Nomad datacenter
and every Zone can have a single Nomad server which could be connected to form a
quorum and a region.
Nomad servers uses Raft for state replication and Raft being highly consistent
needs a quorum of servers to function, therefore we recommend running an odd
number of Nomad servers in a region. Usually running 3-5 servers in a region is
recommended. The cluster can withstand a failure of one server in a cluster of
three servers and two failures in a cluster of five servers. Adding more servers
to the quorum adds more time to replicate state and hence throughput decreases
so we don't recommend having more than seven servers in a region.
**Nomad clients** do not have the same latency requirements as servers since they
are not participating in Raft. Thus clients can have 100+ millisecond latency to
their servers. This allows having a set of Nomad servers that service clients
that can be spread geographically over a continent or even the world in the case
of having a single "global" region and many datacenter.