Hardware requirements & support
Should you be worried about your existing hardware?
Stability is the one cornerstone that can make or break a server deployment. This is why you’ll rarely find bleedingedge software on a server distribution like Debian, which is notorious for the laborious testing that it puts all of its software through. Of all the distributions featured in this Roundup, Debian also has the distinction of supporting the most number of architectures, and provides installable images for 64-bit, 32-bit, Arm and various others.
As with the software, its also advisable to only use slightly dated hardware components for your production servers, as these have the best chance of being supported by the distribution. Many distributions publish a list of all supported hardware to ensure smooth sailing.
Any hardware certified compatible with Ubuntu will work just fine with Zentyal, since the latter is based on Ubuntu server. The latest release is based on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, so hardware compatible with it will work flawlessly.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux publishes a list of certified hardware. Clearos and Nethserver recommend that users only use hardware from this list. This makes sense considering that these distros are based on Centos, which is built using the RHEL codebase. Centos also maintains a user-contributed hardware compatibility list, but it’s best to stick to the certified hardware according to RHEL.
Clearos and Nethserver insist on at least 1GB RAM for optimum performance and 10GB disk space for installation. The actual disk space usage depends on the software and services you want to set up.