Select the Installation Platform.

NetMon can be installed directly on supported hardware or on a virtual machine. Select a computer or virtual environment that meets the requirements listed in this section. If you are using your own hardware, remove any disk drives smaller than 60 GB from the system.

The minimum evaluation platform should not be used for production deployments of NetMon. The minimum evaluation size lets you evaluate a low load of traffic for a short time (one or two days). As the disk or VM space fills up, you may encounter unexpected behavior. For information about how to maintain a limited installation, see Maintain a Minimal NetMon.

NetMon is not supported on systems that use shared disks. Installing on a system that uses shared disks can have a significant negative impact on performance.

dFlows per Second	Performance	Operating System	CPU/Processor	Disk Drives
Minimal Evaluation	Processing: 100 Mb/s Capture: 10 Mb/s	CentOS 7.9	4 vCPU 12 GB RAM 2 NIC	Minimum IOPS: 100 Drive Size: 60 GB
1–1000	Processing: 1 Gb/s Capture: 1 Gb/s	CentOS 7.9	1 x 2.3 GHz 12 Core CPU 24 vCPU 64 GB RAM PERC H740 Integrated RAID Controller (8 GB cache) 2 x 10-Gb/s NIC 2 x 1-Gb/s NIC	OS Drive: 2 x 240 GB M.2 SSD 0.3 DWPD RAID 1 Hardware IOPS: 85,000 Recommended IOPS: 150 220 GB usable Data Drives: 8 x 600 GB 10K RPM SAS RAID 5 + 1 HS Hardware IOPS: 717 Recommended IOPS: 717 3,312 GB
More than 1000	Processing: 5 Gb/s Capture: 2.5 Gb/s	CentOS 7.9	2 x 2.6 GHz 14 Core CPU 56 vCPU ≥ 128 GB RAM PERC H740 Integrated RAID Controller (8 GB cache) 2 x 10-Gb/s NIC 2 x 1-Gb/s NIC	OS Drive: 2 x 240 GB M.2 SSD 0.3 DWPD RAID 1 Hardware IOPS: 85,000 Recommended IOPS: 150 220 GB usable Data Drives: 24 x 600 GB 10K RPM SAS RAID 5 + 1 HS Hardware IOPS: 2,115 Recommended IOPS: 2,115 12,232 GB

To install NetMon on a VMware vSphere VM (VMware vSphere Server/Client 6.0.0), you must run a script (AddEth.pl) to ensure that the correct management and capture interfaces are detected and that interface selection works as expected. NetMon includes a utility to assist with this configuration. For more information, see Configure the NetMon on a VMware vSphere Virtual Machine.

NetMon is an I/O-intensive solution that requires dedicated physical drives to achieve the published rates specified. NetMon makes no distinction between Direct Attached Storage (DAS) or Storage Area Network (SAN), but the disk volumes must be dedicated.

One NIC is used for NetMon’s management interface. The other NIC is used for TAP data. The data rate for your TAP NIC depends on your licensed capture rate.