Stream sizing

Sizing guidelines for Stream VMs and M-Series appliances.

When considering sizing for Stream it is important to understand that the traffic mix at customer sites varies widely. Some customers have traffic mixes that skew towards larger flows (think file transfers), and some will skew towards smaller flows. Performance will be lower when the traffic mix skews towards smaller flows as there will be more metadata to process. The below are guidelines for average traffic mixes and should not be considered absolute. Throughput refers to the amount of traffic observed by Sensors that forward metadata to the Vectra platform.

Hypervisor/Cloud	VM Type	Cores	Memory	Storage	~ Throughput
VMware	vSphere 6.5 or later	2	8 GB	100 GB	Up to 2.5 Gbps
VMware	vSphere 6.5 or later	4	8 GB	150 GB	2.5 to 5 Gbps
VMware	vSphere 6.5 or later	8	16 GB	150 GB	5 to 10 Gbps
VMware	vSphere 6.5 or later	16	64 GB	150 GB	10 to 20 Gbps
Hyper-V	Windows Server 2016 w/ HW v8 or higher	2	8 GB	100 GB	Up to 2.5 Gbps
Hyper-V	Windows Server 2016 w/ HW v8 or higher	4	8 GB	150 GB	2.5 to 5 Gbps
Hyper-V	Windows Server 2016 w/ HW v8 or higher	8	16 GB	150 GB	5 to 10 Gbps
Hyper-V	Windows Server 2016 w/ HW v8 or higher	16	64 GB	500 GB	10 to 20 Gbps
KVM	Standard PC (Q35 + ICH9, 2009)	2	8 GB	100 GB	Up to 2.5 Gbps
KVM	Standard PC (Q35 + ICH9, 2009)	4	8 GB	150 GB	2.5 to 5 Gbps
KVM	Standard PC (Q35 + ICH9, 2009)	8	16GB	150 GB	5 to 10 Gbps
KVM	Standard PC (Q35 + ICH9, 2009)	16	64 GB	500 GB	10 to 20 Gbps
AWS	c5.xlarge	4	8 GB	50 GB	Up to 5 Gbps
AWS	c5.2xlarge	8	16 GB	50 GB	5 to 10 Gbps
AWS	c5.4xlarge	16	32 GB	50 GB	10 to 20 Gbps
Azure	Standard_DS4_v2	8	28 GB	50 GB	Up to 10 Gbps
Azure	Standard_DS5_v2	16	56 GB	50 GB	10 to 20 Gbps
GCP	e2-standard-4	4	16 GB	50 GB	Up to 5 Gbps
GCP	e2-standard-8	8	32 GB	50 GB	5 to 10 Gbps
GCP	e2-standard-16	16	64 GB	50 GB	10 to 20 Gbps

Vectra M Series Physical Appliance

The M series physical appliances can support up to ~75 Gbps of throughput.

Please Note:

• Contact your account team or Vectra support for guidance on special situations, abnormal traffic mixes, or throughput needs outside of what is documented above.

• Vectra recommends that Stream VMs are configured to use storage local to the hypervisor and are not stored on a SAN. Stream VMs require extremely high throughput from their disk storage and this throughput cannot normally be sustained by SAN systems without impact to other SAN users.

• Please see VMware vSensor specifications for guidance on supported CPUs, storage/SANs, networking requirements, vMotion, Enhanced vMotion compatibility, and unsupported hypervisors. While Sensor and VMware specific, this article applies to Stream VMs as well. The general guidance in the article also applies to Hyper-V and KVM deployments.