System Requirement

EVE-NG System Requirements
EVE-NG is currently released as an OVA file and ISO. An OVA is a Open Virtual Appliance format. It’s an archive (TAR) which holds disks and configuration file (OVF or Open Virtualization File) for the virtual machine. EVE-NG can be also directly installed on the physical hardware, without any virtualization by use of ISO image. Because EVE-NG runs many hypervisor, it’s strongly recommended a physical server dedicated for it, without any virtualization software. Mind that nested virtualization is not a good thing and can lead to poor performance.

EVE-NG requires:

  • Intel CPU VT-x/EPT
  • One of the following:
    • Ubuntu Xenial Xerus 16.04.X LTS 64bit (suggested with any processors). (Ubuntu 18 and 19 are not supported due it still not have all necessary libs for EVE)
    • VMware ESXi 6.0 or later
    • VMware Workstation 12.5 or later
    • VMware Fusion 8 or later
    • VMware Player 12.5 or later
    • Google Cloud platform VM

NOT Officially supported or have issues:

  • VIRTUAL BOX DOESN’T SUPPORT HW ACCELERATION !!! AVOID USING IT !!!!
  • AMD-V/RVI is “capable” processor but not officially supported. AMD CPU newest versions are supported but as Bare EVE install only. Not for ESXi or VM Ware workstation. AMD CPU Does not support newest Qemu version which are required for newest vendor images like Cisco CSRv1000 or Juniper vMX v19.x.
  • Hyper-V, Promox and XEN Citrix are not officially supported.
  • Azure cloud is not officially supported, because Azure overwrite kernel for EVE VM, and do not accept custom Kernels for VM Machines.
  • AWS cloud is not officially supported due issues with sub-virtualization. It has issues to run Qemu nodes.

Required CPU and RAM depend on how many nodes are needed to run. 4 vCPU and 6GB of RAM can be enough for IOU/IOL and Dynamips only, but will be insufficient for topology with CSR1000V routers.

In other words the EVE-NG requirements are the same for nested ESXi virtualization or Cisco VIRL/CML. EVE-NG can still work without Intel VT processors and can run installed within other hypervisors also But:

  • 64 bits (x86_64) appliances won’t work.
  • Poor performances should be expected with 32 bits (i386) appliances.

  REFERENCES