Hardware Requirements
Note: The following recommendations are guidelines for the minimum hardware allocations. Certain types of scans are more resource intensive. If you run complex scans, especially those with credentials, you may require additional disk space, memory, and processing power.
Storage Requirements
You must install Nessus on direct-attached storage (DAS) devices. Nessus does not support storage area networks (SANs) or network-attached storage (NAS) configurations.
Nessus Scanners and Nessus Professional
The following information lists the hardware requirements for Nessus scanners and Nessus Professional.
Scanning up to 50,000 hosts per scan
- CPU: 4 2GHz cores
- Memory: 4 GB RAM (8 GB RAM recommended)
- Disk space: 30 GB
Scanning more than 50,000 hosts per scan
- CPU: 8 2GHz cores
- Memory: 8 GB RAM (16 GB RAM recommended)
- Disk space: 30 GB (Additional space may be needed for reporting)
Nessus Manager
The following table lists the hardware requirements for Nessus Manager.
Nessus Manager with 0-10,000 agents
- CPU: 4 2GHz cores
- Memory: 16 GB RAM
- Disk space: 30 GB (Additional space may be needed for reporting)
Nessus Manager with 10,001-20,000 agents
- CPU: 8 2GHz cores
- Memory: 64 GB RAM
- Disk space: 30 GB (Additional space may be needed for reporting)
Note: Engage with your Tenable representative for large deployments.
Virtual Machine
Nessus can be installed on a Virtual Machine that meets the same requirements. If your virtual machine is using Network Address Translation (NAT) to reach the network, many of the Nessus vulnerability checks, host enumeration, and operating system identification are negatively affected.
Nessus Agents
Nessus Agents are designed to be lightweight and to use only minimal system resources. Generally, a Nessus Agent uses 40 MB of RAM (all pageable). A Nessus Agent uses almost no CPU while idle, but is designed to use up to 100% of CPU when available during jobs.
For more information on Nessus Agent resource usage, see Agent Software Footprint and Agent Host System Utilization.
The following table outlines the minimum recommended hardware for operating a Nessus Agent. Nessus Agents can be installed on a virtual machine that meets the same requirements specified.
Hardware (Minimum Requirement)
Processor: 1 Dual-core CPU
Processor Speed < 1 Ghz
RAM < 1 GB
Disk Space: < 1 GB with normal usage / < 2 GB under certain conditions, e.g. when a plugins-code.db defragmentation operation is in progress
Disk Speed: 15-50 IOPS