System Requirements

It is important to plan ahead and allocate resources based on the expected number and types of nodes in the simulations that the CML server will run. The CML application services have modest system requirements: when CML isn’t running any labs, the idle CML server uses only about 1 GB of memory and very little CPU. For system sizing, you should consider the maximum number and types of nodes that you expect to run simultaneously on your CML server. That is, for all labs that are running at the same time, count the number of nodes of each type in those labs, and add up the nominal amount of memory and CPU used by each node. The CML FAQ on Reference Platforms provides a table of the default resource requirements for each node type.

Important

The values listed below are the minimum recommended requirements for CML 2.x. Using these minimum values will restrict the number of nodes that you can simulate and could impact overall system performance. If you are deploying CML as a virtual machine, the memory, CPU, and disk size values are the resources that must be allocated to the CML VM, not the values for the host OS.

CML Server / VM Requirements

System Resource	Minimum Requirements (default configuration)
Memory	8 GB
CPU	4+ (physical) cores, Intel processor * Processor must support VTx and EPT.
Network	1 Interface
Hard Disk	32 GB or more

Non-personal CML product offerings, such as CML-Enterprise and CML-Education, are tested on both M4 and M5 models of the UCS C220 and UCS C240 rack servers. Full support for bare metal installations is only available on these server platforms.

Supported Software

The CML web-based user interface requires an HTML5-capable web browser. The UI is tested with both Chrome and Firefox and is supported on those web browsers.

The following hypervisor versions are supported for the CML VM-based deployment option. The OVA file’s virtual hardware version is 10.

Virtualization Platform	Version
VMware Workstation	15 or later
VMware Fusion Pro	11 or later (Intel models only) **
VMware Player	15 or later
VMware ESXi	6.5 or later

Footnotes

* CML is only fully supported when running on Intel processors. While the CML application services run equally well on systems with Intel or AMD processors, some of the bundled reference platform VM images only run on Intel processors. Support for running CML on non-Intel processors will be provided on a best effort basis.

** Note that CML and all of the VM Images for CML Labs are built to run on x86_64 processors. In particular, CML is not compatible with Mac computers with Apple silicon like, the the Apple M1 or Apple M1 Pro.