Advanced hardware pre-requisites

This page details the hardware pre-requisites for the server. In most installations, reading the basic pre-requisites should be sufficient.

NOTE: Installing the REVEN server on a virtual machine is not supported.

Processor

The main CPU bottleneck, when using REVEN with a high performance storage solution, is the replay step, which is using around 4 cores and is highly dependent on single core performance (high frequency and/or high IPC) of the CPU.

In the Professional Edition, you can replay only one scenario at a time. So REVEN will use a maximum of 4 cores for the replay, 2 others for scenario analysis and 2 others cores for the Project Manager.

In the Enterprise Edition, you can replay and analyze an unlimited number of scenarios at a time, so determining how many cores are needed will depend on your usage of REVEN.

Our recommendation is to choose a high-frequency Intel or AMD processor(*) with at least 8 cores. Besides, the most recent processor, the most performance you will get out of it. So, last-gen processors are the best choice. On lower-performance processor, REVEN can still be used but will be slower.

A desktop processor is good enough in a large number of cases. Server processors tend to have a higher number of cores but reduced single core performance. They may be preferred when your workload consists of several concurrent replay tasks or scenario analysis sessions. Mobile processors can be used although they often exhibit lower performance than desktop processors.

(*): Currently, AMD processors can only be used to record QEMU virtual machines, not VirtualBox virtual machines. Learn more about VBox recording here. Unless you have specific recording requirements, we generally recommend using QEMU virtual machines.

Memory

In terms of capacity, in the Professional Edition, the minimum is 16GB but we recommend to have at least 32GB. For the Enterprise Edition, it also depends on your usage (number of simultaneous replays and running REVEN servers).

NOTE: To avoid curbing your high-end processor, having fast enough RAM (frequency + timing) is necessary.

Storage

REVEN is highly I/O performance dependent, and requires at least a SATA SSD, but we recommend having a NVME SSD or better. Note that any type of RAID-0 configuration may help reduce the disk I/O bottleneck. For example if you have a really high-end processor and/or if you will replay multiple scenarios at a time.

As scenarios/VMs can require up to hundreds of GB on disk, the minimum capacity of your storage should be 1TB. We recommend 2TB or more to work on more unarchived scenario in parallel and reduce import/export operations.

We also recommend having extra HDD storage to archive unused scenarios.

Internet access

In the Professional Edition, an active Internet access to https://api.keygen.sh and https://dist.keygen.sh is required while using REVEN.

For both editions, an active Internet access is recommended for downloading symbol information, unless you are using an offline PDB server (see also Using PDBs on air-gapped networks for more information about this use case).