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Coveo Platform Hardware and Software Requirements

Sub-sections in this topic
Index of up to 5 Million Documents (Minimum Requirements)
Index From 5 to 20 Million Documents
Index From 20 to 40 Million Documents
Index From 40 to 80 Million Documents
Operating System Compatibility
Index Size
Non Index Files
RAID Configuration
Near Real-Time Indexing Disk
Third-Party Software Requirement
TLS/SSL Compatibility

This topic presents the hardware, software, and operating system specs for the server on which you install Coveo Enterprise Search (CES) for various index size ranges that one Coveo instance can manage. The system specifications apply to back-end Coveo Master and Mirror servers.

Notes:

  • Operate CES on a dedicated server. When other processes are running in parallel or when the query activity reaches peaks and becomes mission-critical, a server meeting the specified requirements may not be sufficient.

  • Coveo products work best on physical machines, but also support virtual environments such as VMware (ESX), Microsoft Hyper-V, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure.

  • Consider distributing the index over more than one Coveo instance when the number of documents to index exceeds the maximum index size presented in this topic (see Coveo Scalability Model).

  • Contact Coveo Support for assistance to select the best Coveo configuration for your environment.

Index of up to 5 Million Documents (Minimum Requirements)

Component Minimum Requirement
Operating System Windows Server
CPU - Processors 4 Core (1×4), 2.0 GHz or higher
RAM - Memory 16 GB
Disk - OS and Program Files 1 x 150 GB SATA 7.2/10 K RPM
Disk - Index (1 slice) 1 x 300 GB SATA 7.2/10 K RPM
Disk - Near Real-Time Indexing (optional) 1 x 150 GB SSD or SATA 7.2/10 K RPM

Important: Ensure that your environment meets the above minimum requirements and follows recommendations below before contacting Coveo Support to get help for a performance issue.

Index From 5 to 20 Million Documents

Component Recommendation
Operating System Windows Server
CPU - Processors 8 Core (1×8), 2.0 GHz or higher
RAM - Memory 32 GB
Disks - OS and Program Files 2 x 150 GB SAS 10/15 K RPM, RAID 1
Disks - Index (1 slice) 2 x 600 GB SAS 10/15 K RPM, RAID 1
Disks - Other CES Files 2 x 300 GB SAS 10/15 K RPM, RAID 1
Disk - Near Real-Time Indexing (optional) 2 x 300 GB SSD or SATA 10 K RPM, RAID 1

Index From 20 to 40 Million Documents

Component Recommendation
Operating System Windows Server
CPU - Processors 16 Core (2×8) to 24 Core (2×12), 2.4 GHz or higher
RAM - Memory 64 GB
Disks - OS and Program Files 2 x 150 GB SAS 10/15 K RPM, RAID 1
Disks - Index (1 slice) 4 x 600 GB SAS 10/15 K RPM, RAID 10
Disks - Other CES Files 2 x 600 GB SAS 10/15 K RPM, RAID 1
Disk - Near Real-Time Indexing (optional) 2 x 300 GB SSD or SATA 10 K RPM, RAID 1

Index From 40 to 80 Million Documents

Component Recommendation
Operating System Windows Server
CPU - Processors 24 Core (2×12) to 32 Core (4×8), 2.4 GHz or higher
RAM - Memory 128 GB
Disks - OS and Program Files 2 x 150 GB SAS 10/15 K RPM, RAID 1
Disks - Index (slice 1) 4 x 600 GB SAS 10/15 K RPM, RAID 10
Disks - Index (slice 2) 4 x 600 GB SAS 10/15 K RPM, RAID 10
Disks - Other CES Files 2 x 600 GB SAS 10/15 K RPM, RAID 1
Disk - Near Real-Time Indexing (optional) 2 x 300 GB SSD or SATA 10 K RPM, RAID 1

Important: No server should hold more than 80 million documents. When a server exceeds this limit, it is recommended to split the content logically and have search interfaces built around GDI, aggregating results from multiple indexes (see Coveo Scalability Model). Splitting any other way and have all queries go against all indexes would reduce performance.

Example: Your server holds 120 million documents of which 70 million are emails. The best way to split the content would be to have the archived emails on a server, the live emails on another, and other types of content on a third server. That way, when one of your users is searching for emails, their queries go in the index with the live emails. You could also enable the option to add archived emails (disabled by default) in the mix, and have another search interface for your other content.

Operating System Compatibility

The servers on which CES or Coveo .NET Front-End run must use one of the following OS:

Important: The x64 Windows OS version is required for indexes with more than 500 K documents.

Notes: CES can operate on non-server versions of Windows operating systems. However, for production purposes, Coveo only supports and recommends Windows Server operating systems to prevent performance, stability, and scalability issues.

For evaluation purpose only CES can run under:

Index Size

The index typically occupies 30% to 50% of the total size of the original documents.

Example: You index documents that occupy 1 TB in various repositories. With your mix of content type, the index size ends up at 42% of the original documents size (420 GB). The size of the dedicated index hard disk should be at least 500 GB.

  • Dedicate a disk or disk set to the index files.

  • Use local disks, direct-attached storage (DAS), or storage area network (SAN). Network-attached storage (NAS) as well as server message block (SMB) and other files shares are not supported.

  • When a second index slice is required, you must install each slice on separate disk sets.

  • RAID 0 and RAID 5 are not recommended (see RAID Type Comparison and Recommendations).

Note: The index automatically switches to the read-only mode to prevent errors when the index disk free space reaches a minimum of 5 GB (see Toggling the Index Between the Read-Write and Read-Only Modes) .

Non Index Files

For index sizes with more than 5 million documents, it is recommended to store non index CES files on a dedicated set of disks to separate inputs/outputs for these files from those for index slices.

The non index files are:

  • Log files

  • Default slice files

  • Converter files

  • Connector files

  • Cache files

  • Configuration files

  • Certificate store files

Note: You will specify the path for these files following the CES installation when you create the index (see Creating a New Index or Importing an Existing CES 6 Index Configuration).

RAID Configuration

  • It is recommended to create a RAID volume (a single accessible storage area) for each of the three categories of files: 

    • OS and program files

    • Index files slice

    • Other Coveo Enterprise Search (CES) files

  • One RAID controller can be used for all logical volumes as long as it supports the number of disks in your server.

Example: The following typical Coveo server hard disk RAID configuration for a 20-40 M document index is made of 8 disks organized in three RAID volumes (C:, D:, and E: in this example).

Near Real-Time Indexing Disk

The Near Real-Time Indexing (NRTI) feature allows to make new documents searchable significantly faster for indexes with two million documents or more (see About Near Real-Time Indexing).

When you want to fully take advantage of this feature, because NRTI is I/O intensive, it is recommended to add a NRTI dedicated disk to your Coveo Master and Mirror servers that are serving queries and configure NRTI to use the dedicated disk (see Configuring Near Real-Time Indexing).

The recommended disk specifications depend on the size of your index as shown in the first sub-sections of this topic.

Third-Party Software Requirement

The CES installer adds the following required software elements when not already installed:

  • Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 and 4.5.2 (side by side)

  • Internet Information Services (IIS) 8 or 7

  • Microsoft Chart Controls for Dotnet Framework 3.5 SP1

  • Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable Package (x64)

    Note: Microsoft Visual C++ 2012 Redistributable Package (x64) is installed through the CES installer, which requires Microsoft Visual C++ 2010.

  • MSXML 6

TLS/SSL Compatibility

Transport Layer Security (TLS) and its predecessor, Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), both of which are frequently referred to as "SSL", are cryptographic protocols that provide communications security over a computer network. Several versions of the protocols are in widespread use in applications such as web browsing, email, instant messaging, and voice-over-IP (VoIP).

Different versions of CES 7 offer a different support. Should your CES 7 version not support the right protocol version, it is strongly recommended that you upgrade to at least the lowest version that supports the protocol version that you need.

Example: You just installed Coveo .NET Frond-End on a new server. When you open the default search page, you receive the following message: The search interface is not available at this moment. Please try again later. If the problem persists, please contact your system administrator. When you ask for more details, you receive this message: The client and server cannot communicate, because they do not possess a common algorithm.

This is very likely to be linked to an incompatible cryptographic protocol.

The table below indicates which version of CES 7 is compatible with which cryptographic protocol.

CES 7 Version TLS 1.2 TLS 1.1 TLS 1.0 SSL 3.0
Starting March 2016 (7.0.8225) Yes Yes Yes Yes
February 2015 (7.0.7402) to December 2015 (7.0.8047) - - Yes Yes
January 2015 (7.0.7338) and earlier - - - Yes
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