87 lines
3.5 KiB
Markdown
87 lines
3.5 KiB
Markdown
---
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title: Validator Requirements
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---
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## Minimum SOL requirements
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There is no strict minimum amount of SOL required to run a validator on Solana.
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However in order to participate in consensus, a vote account is required which
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has a rent-exempt reserve of 0.02685864 SOL. Voting also requires sending a vote
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transaction for each block the validator agrees with, which can cost up to
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1.1 SOL per day.
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## Hardware Recommendations
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- CPU
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- 12 cores / 24 threads, or more
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- 2.8GHz, or faster
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- AVX2 instruction support (to use official release binaries, self-compile
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otherwise)
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- Support for AVX512f and/or SHA-NI instructions is helpful
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- The AMD Threadripper Zen3 series is popular with the validator community
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- RAM
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- 128GB, or more
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- Motherboard with 256GB capacity suggested
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- Disk
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- PCIe Gen3 x4 NVME SSD, or better
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- Accounts: 500GB, or larger. High TBW (Total Bytes Written)
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- Ledger: 1TB or larger. High TBW suggested
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- OS: (Optional) 500GB, or larger. SATA OK
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- The OS may be installed on the ledger disk, though testing has shown better
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performance with the ledger on its own disk
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- Accounts and ledger _can_ be stored on the same disk, however due to high
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IOPS, this is not recommended
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- The Samsung 970 and 980 Pro series SSDs are popular with the validator community
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- GPUs
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- Not strictly necessary at this time
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- Motherboard and power supply speced to add one or more high-end GPUs in the
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future suggested
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## Virtual machines on Cloud Platforms
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While you can run a validator on a cloud computing platform, it may not
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be cost-efficient over the long term.
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However, it may be convenient to run non-voting api nodes on VM instances for
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your own internal usage. This use case includes exchanges and services built on
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Solana.
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In fact, the mainnet-beta validators operated by the team are currently
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(Mar. 2021) run on GCE `n2-standard-32` (32 vCPUs, 128 GB memory) instances with
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2048 GB SSD for operational convenience.
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For other cloud platforms, select instance types with similar specs.
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Also note that egress internet traffic usage may turn out to be high,
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especially for the case of running staked validators.
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## Docker
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Running validator for live clusters (including mainnet-beta) inside Docker is
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not recommended and generally not supported. This is due to concerns of general
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Docker's containerzation overhead and resultant performance degradation unless
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specially configured.
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We use Docker only for development purposes. Docker Hub contains images for all
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releases at [solanalabs/solana](https://hub.docker.com/r/solanalabs/solana).
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## Software
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- We build and run on Ubuntu 20.04.
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- See [Installing Solana](../cli/install-solana-cli-tools.md) for the current Solana software release.
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Be sure to ensure that the machine used is not behind a residential NAT to avoid
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NAT traversal issues. A cloud-hosted machine works best. **Ensure that IP ports 8000 through 10000 are not blocked for Internet inbound and outbound traffic.**
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For more information on port forwarding with regards to residential networks,
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see [this document](http://www.mcs.sdsmt.edu/lpyeatt/courses/314/PortForwardingSetup.pdf).
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Prebuilt binaries are available for Linux x86_64 on CPUs supporting AVX2 \(Ubuntu 20.04 recommended\).
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MacOS or WSL users may build from source.
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## GPU Requirements
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CUDA is required to make use of the GPU on your system. The provided Solana
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release binaries are built on Ubuntu 20.04 with [CUDA Toolkit 10.1 update 1](https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-toolkit-archive). If your machine is using
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a different CUDA version then you will need to rebuild from source.
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