System requirements

The following requirements are for typical usage patterns, acknowledging that some patterns may require greater system resources for a N-able N-central server than others.

If you have any questions about how your needs affect the system requirements of your N-able N-central server, contact your Channel Sales Specialist or email n-able-salesgroup@n-able.com.

Processor

Server class x86_64 CPUs manufactured by Intel or AMD (i.e. Xeon or EPYC).

Operating System

You do not need to install a separate Operating System to run N-able N-central. The N-able N-central ISO includes a modified version of CentOS 7, based on the upstream Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.

Physical Hardware

Server Grade hard drives connected to a RAID controller with a Battery/Capacitor Backed Cache are Required. Examples include 10K+ RPM SCSI or SAS drives, Enterprise Grade SSDs or NVMes for bare metal and virtualized hosts, or a Fibre Channel connected SAN with Enterprise Grade hard drives for virtualized hosts (Fibre Channel cards can be used for bare metal if they are configured in the pre-boot environment and do NOT require vendor-provided drivers).

Although Desktop Hard Drives will work with the Operating System, they do not meet the minimum throughput required for the back-end Database of N-able N-central.

Firmware

64-bit UEFI Firmware (32- bit UEFI or CSM mode is not supported)

Virtualization passthrough (Recommended)

Secure Boot (Recommended)

TPM 2.0 (Recommended)

System requirements by number of devices managed

The table below lists the minimum specifications required to manage the number of devices indicated (based on average usage). Performance can be improved by exceeding these requirements. When determining your hardware requirements, consider any growth in managed device count that may occur over time.

These requirements are only for on-premise deployments of N-able N-central.

Number of Devices

CPU Cores

Memory

Storage

Up to 1,000

2

8GB RAM

120 GB Redundant Storage

Up to 3,000

4

8 GB RAM

200 GB Redundant Storage

Up to 6,000

8

16 GB RAM

350 GB Redundant Storage

Up to 9,000

12

24 GB RAM

450 GB Redundant Storage

Up to 12,000

16

32 GB RAM

600 GB Redundant Storage

Up to 16,000

22

48 GB RAM

800 GB Redundant Storage

Up to 20,000

28

64 GB RAM

1 TB Redundant Storage

Up to 24,000

34

80 GB RAM

1.2 TB Redundant Storage

Notes

  1. Server Grade hard drives connected to a RAID controller with a Battery/Capacitor Backed Cache, are required to ensure performance and unexpected power-loss data protection.
  2. In a virtualized environment, hard drives for the N-able N-central server must not be shared with any other applications or VM guests that have significant I/O workloads. For example, Report Manager, SQL Databases, E-Mail Servers, Active Directory Domain Controllers, SharePoint, or similar should not be installed on the same physical hard drive as N-able N-central.
  3. N-able recommends two or more hard drives be placed in a redundant RAID configuration. With two drives, RAID 1 must be used. With more than two drives, RAID 1+0 or RAID 5 are recommended. RAID 6 is an option on servers with less than 1,000 devices (the additional write latency of RAID 6 becomes an issue above 1,000 devices).
  4. N-able recommends more, smaller disks in a RAID array, as opposed to fewer larger disks. Database-backed applications, like N-able N-central, have better write performance with an increased number of parallel writes (hard drives).
  5. If using Solid State Drives (SSDs), N-able requires Enterprise Grade, SLC based (or better) SSDs with a SAS interface, or Enterprise Grade NVMes. SSD and NVMe drives must have an endurance rating of at least 0.2 DWPD (Drive Writes Per Day), and at least 2 physical disks in a redundant RAID array. On Bare Metal servers, the RAID array must appear to the operating system as a single Block or NVMe Device. Currently, many PCIe and NVMe drives do not meet this last requirement and would only work in a virtualized environment.
  6. Configure the RAID controller to use the default stripe size and a Read/Write cache of 50%/50%.

The underlying customized version of CentOS 7 has certain hardware limits that are consistent with the upstream Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 distribution. Of note are the following:

Due to the ecosystem of different hardware, N-able does not certify specific hardware configurations. Instead we rely on the upstream AlmaLinux OS and hardware vendor testing and certification.

Please consult with your hardware vendor to ensure that any server to be used for a bare metal installation meets the above requirements and is Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.9 certified, without the need for additional drivers.

N-able recommends that for any Bare Metal server, two or more SAS 10k or faster hard drives be placed in a RAID array to improve redundancy. RAID 1+0 or RAID 5 are supported (at the hardware RAID BIOS level). RAID 6 is an option on servers with less than 1,000 devices (the additional write latency of RAID 6 becomes an issue above 1,000 devices).

Support for virtualized environments

N-able supports VMware ESX Server 6.0 or newer and Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V or newer LTS versions. N-able recommends use of the latest stable versions of VMware or Hyper-V in order to ensure the best performance, feature set and compatibility with N-able N-central.

Hyper-V on Windows Desktop Operating Systems is not Supported.

N-able N-central installed on a virtual machine running on a Desktop Operating System (such as Hyper-V on Windows 10/11, Virtual Box, Parallels, VMWare Fusion or similar) is not a supported configuration. If you are using Windows Hyper-V, it must be installed on a supported server class Windows Operating System.

Windows Server Semi-Annual Releases are not Supported.

Only Long-Term Support (LTS) versions of the Windows Server Operating System are supported as a Hyper-V host for N-able N-central. Microsoft releases "Semi-Annual Release" versions of Windows Server as a technology preview for the next LTS version. Due to their technology preview status, these "Semi-Annual Release" versions of Windows Server are not supported as Hyper-V hosts for N-able N-central.

About virtualization

Virtualization provides an abstraction layer between the hardware and the Operating System which permits the operation of multiple logical systems on one physical server unit. The table below includes considerations when using this deployment method.

System Performance

It is impossible to guarantee the scalability or performance of a N-able N-central server deployed on a Virtual Machine due to:
  • variability in field environments resulting from host server configurations,
  • the number of virtual guests run on the host server, and
  • the performance of the underlying host hardware.

Supportability

N-able supports N-able N-central software deployed on VMWare ESX/ESXi 6.0 or newer, Windows Server 2016 Hyper-V or newer LTS releases, Microsoft Azure and Amazon AWS EC2 in the same way that we support N-able N-central deployed on Bare Metal. This support is limited to the components (Software and Operating System) shipped with N-able N-central and does not include the troubleshooting of virtualization systems nor of performance issues related to environmental factors.

N-able recommends reaching out to your hardware or virtualization vendor for support on the underlying virtualization and hardware components. Any assistance provided by N-able Support for virtualization or hardware issues is on a best-effort basis only. In the event of serious performance problems, we might ask you to migrate a virtualized N-able N-central system to a physical hardware deployment.

Virtual Hardware Support

In Windows Server 2016 Hyper-V or newer deployments, it is recommended to create a new Generation 2 VM. When configuring the VM virtual hardware, if you choose to enable Secure Boot, please select the Microsoft UEFI Certificate Authority template.

For VMWare ESX/ESXi deployments, it is recommended to select the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 guest OS template, then under the Boot Options, select the UEFI Firmware.

Network Adapters

N-able recommends using the VMXNET3 network card in VMWare. When the VM is configured as Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, it will use VMXNET3 by default.

Unless you are using Network Interface Bonding, N-able N-central requires only one (1) network adapter added to the VM configuration. Multiple network adapters that are not used in a bonding configuration can cause connectivity and licensing issues.

MAC Addresses

By default, most virtualization environments use a dynamically assigned MAC address for each virtual network card. As your N-able N-central license is generated in part by using the MAC address of its network card, it is required to use a statically assigned MAC address in order to avoid becoming de-licensed.

Recommended configuration for the virtualized server

Although provisioning virtual disks as "thin" or "thick" results in nearly-identical performance, thick provisioning is recommended, particularly when more than 1,000 devices will be connected to your N-able N-central server.

  • Assign the highest resource access priority to N-able N-central, as compared to other guest VMs.
  • Do not over-provision resources (Memory, CPU, Disk) on the virtualization host. Over-provisioning these resources can cause memory swapping to disk, and other bottlenecks that can impact guest system performance.
  • Ensure that the system has enough RAM and hard drive space to provide permanently allocated resources to the N-able N-central guest.

Supported Software

Browsers

N-able N-central supports the latest desktop versions of:

  • Microsoft Edge®
  • Mozilla Firefox®
  • Google Chrome®
  • Apple Safari®
  • Mobile phone browsers are not supported.

Remote Control

Remote control connections require the following software on the computers that initiate connections:

  • .NET Framework 4.5.2 on Windows devices
  • Oracle Java 1.8 versions that include Java Web Start

Report Manager

To use Report Manager with N-able N-central, ensure that you upgrade to the latest version of Report Manager.

Automation Manager

  • .NET Framework 4.6
  • PowerShell version 5.1 or later is the minimum PowerShell version required to run automation manager:
    • PowerShell 5.1 or later is backwards compatible with previous versions of PowerShell
    • You can run both PowerShell 5.1 or later and 7.x on your endpoints, however Automation manager objects will depend on PowerShell 5.1 or later and its backwards compatibility with previous versions.
    • Currently to-date, we do not have any objects that call PowerShell version 7.x

Microsoft Azure - Managed Disks

To deploy N-able N-central to Azure with Managed Disks using the deployment script, you require PowerShell 7.x. See Deployment script for Microsoft Azure - Managed Disks for details.

SNMP Community String

On HPE ProLiant Generation 9 or older Physical Servers, when monitoring the N-able N-central server using SNMP, the community string used for SNMP queries to the server must use N-central_SNMP, not public. SNMP is only enabled on HPE ProLiant Generation 9 or older Physical Servers. All other installs do not enable SNMP on the N-able N-central server.

Supported Operating Systems

This section describes the supported operating systems for N-able N-central.

Windows Agents:

  • Microsoft .NET Framework 4.5.2 (or later)

Windows Server 2022

  • Windows Server 2022 Standard
  • Windows Server 2022 Datacenter
  • Windows Server 2022 Datacenter: Azure

Windows Server 2019

  • Windows Server 2019 Datacenter
  • Windows Server 2019 Standard
  • Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2019

Windows Server 2016

  • Windows Server 2016 Datacenter
  • Windows Server 2016 Standard
  • Windows Server 2016 Essentials
  • Windows Storage Server 2016
  • Windows Server 2016 MultiPoint Premium Server
  • Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2016

Windows Server 2012

  • R2 Datacenter
  • R2 Essentials
  • R2 Foundation
  • R2 Standard

Windows 11

  • Microsoft Windows 11 Enterprise & Professional
  • Microsoft Windows 11 Education editions
  • Microsoft Windows 11 Pro for Workstations

Windows 10

  • Microsoft Windows 10 Enterprise & Professional
  • Microsoft Windows 10 Education editions
  • Windows 10 Pro for Workstations

macOS Agents

  • 14.x (Sonoma)

  • 13.x (Ventura)

  • 12.x (Monterey)

Linux Agents

Independent Agents are required for 64-bit Linux OS installations.

The probe performs an SSH connection to a Linux device. To discover a Linux OS device, the device must have openssh installed.

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux/CentOS 8 (64-bit)
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux/CentOS 7 (64-bit)
  • Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (64-bit)

  • Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (64-bit)

  • Debian 12 (64-bit)

  • Debian 11 (64-bit)

AV Defender

Workstation Operating Systems

  • Microsoft Windows 11
  • Microsoft Windows 10 Enterprise
  • Microsoft Windows 10 Pro

Tablet And Embedded Operating Systems

  • Windows 10 IoT Enterprise
  • Windows Embedded 8.1 Industry
  • Windows Embedded 8 Standard
  • Windows Embedded Enterprise 7
  • Windows Embedded POSReady 7
  • Windows Embedded Standard 7
  • Windows Embedded Compact 7

Server Operating Systems

  • Microsoft Windows Server 2022

  • Microsoft Windows Server 2019 (Core Mode)
  • Microsoft Windows Server 2019
  • Microsoft Windows Server Standard 2016 (Core Mode)
  • Microsoft Windows Server 2016
  • Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2

For Microsoft Windows Embedded Standard 7, TCP/IP, Filter Manager, and Windows Installer must all be enabled.

Patch Manager

Workstation Operating Systems

  • Microsoft Windows 11

  • Microsoft Windows 10 version 1607 and later

Server Operating Systems

  • Microsoft Windows Server 2022
  • Microsoft Windows Server 2019
  • Microsoft Windows Server 2016
  • Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2
  • Microsoft Windows Server 2012

The following operating systems are not supported with N-able N-central patch manager:

  • Home Editions of Windows Desktop Operating Systems

Windows Update Agent

The minimum version of the Windows Update Agent (WUA) needs to be greater than 7.6.7600.320. The base NT build version of Windows should be 6.1 or later. Older versions of the base NT build cannot upgrade past version 7.6.7600.256 of the Windows Update Agent.

Automation Manager

Workstation Operating Systems

  • Microsoft Windows 11

  • Microsoft Windows 10 (32/64-bit)

Server Operating Systems

  • Microsoft Windows Server 2022

  • Microsoft Windows Server 2019

  • Microsoft Windows Server 2016 (32/64-bit)

  • Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2 (32/64-bit)

  • Microsoft Windows Server 2012 (32/64-bit)

Disk Encryption Manager

Hyper-V Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V Server 2016
Windows 7 Enterprise Windows 7 Home Premium
Windows 7 Professional Windows 7 Ultimate
 
Windows 8 Enterprise Windows 8 Pro
Windows 8 Pro with Media Center Windows 8.1 Enterprise
Windows 8.1 Pro Windows 8.1 Pro with Media Center
 
Windows 10 Education Windows 10 Enterprise
Windows 10 Enterprise 2015 LTSB Windows 10 Enterprise 2016 LTSB
Windows 10 Enterprise for Virtual Desktops Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC 2019
Windows 10 Pro Windows 10 Pro Education
Windows 10 Pro for Workstations  
 
Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise Windows Server 2008 R2 Datacenter
Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard Windows Server 2008 R2 Foundation
Windows Server 2012 Datacenter Windows Server 2012 Essentials
 
Windows Server 2012 Foundation Windows Server 2012 R2 Datacenter
Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials Windows Server 2012 R2 Foundation
Windows Server 2012 R2 Standard Windows Server 2012 R2 Standard Evaluation
Windows Server 2012 Standard  
 
Windows Server 2016 Datacenter Windows Server 2016 Datacenter Evaluation
Windows Server 2016 Essentials Windows Server 2016 Standard
Windows Server 2016 Standard Evaluation  
 
Windows Server 2019 Datacenter Windows Server 2019 Essentials
Windows Server 2019 Standard Windows Server 2019 Standard Evaluation
 
Windows Server Datacenter  
Windows Small Business Server 2011 Essentials Windows Small Business Server 2011 Standard