This document and the installation and maintenance of a HUBzero system has a target audience of experienced Linux administrators (preferably experienced with RedHat or CentOS distributions).

HUBzero (RedHat) installations require one or more dedicated hosts running RedHat or CentOS version 7.

A typical starter HUBzero installation might consist of a single physical server with dual 64-bit quad-core CPUs, 24 Gigabytes of RAM and a terabyte of disk.

Production systems should try to not limit hardware resources, HUBzero is designed to run on systems with many CPU cores and lots of RAM. If you are looking for a system to run a small site with limited physical or virtual resources this is probably not the system for you. However, for demonstration or development purposes we often create VM images with less than a gigabyte of RAM and 5 gigabytes of disk. While fully functional, these virtual machines would only be suitable for a single user doing development or testing.

System Architecture

All hardware, filesystem partitions, RAID configurations, backup models, security models, etc. and base configurations of the hosts email server, SSH server, network, etc. are the responsibility of the system administrator managing the host.

The Hubzero software expects to be installed on a headless server from a minimal ISO with only one network interface (required by OpenVZ) with an MTU no less than '1500'.  System accounts must not be created with an id of 1000 or greater - more about that in a forthcoming section.