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Validator Requirements

Minimum VLX requirements​

There is no strict minimum amount of VLX required to run a node on Velas. However, in order to participate in consensus validator needs 1M VLX. Voting also requires sending a vote transaction for each block the validator agrees with, which can cost up to 1.1 VLX per day.

Hardware Recommendations​

  • CPU
    • 12 cores / 24 threads, or more
    • 2.8GHz, or faster
    • AVX2 instruction support (to use official release binaries, self-compile otherwise)
    • Support for AVX512f and/or SHA-NI instructions is helpful
    • The AMD Zen3 series is popular with the validator community
  • RAM
    • 128GB, or more
    • Motherboard with 256GB capacity suggested
  • Disk
    • PCIe Gen3 x4 NVME SSD, or better
    • Accounts: 500GB, or larger. High TBW (Total Bytes Written)
    • Ledger: 1TB or larger. High TBW suggested
    • OS: (Optional) 500GB, or larger. SATA OK
    • The OS may be installed on the ledger disk, though testing has shown better performance with the ledger on its own disk
    • Accounts and ledger can be stored on the same disk, however due to high IOPS, this is not recommended
    • The Samsung 970 and 980 Pro series SSDs are popular with the validator community
  • GPUs
    • Not strictly necessary at this time
    • Motherboard and power supply speced to add one or more high-end GPUs in the future suggested

RPC Node Recommendations​

The hardware recommendations above should be considered bare minimums if the validator is intended to be employed as an RPC node. To provide full functionality and improved reliability, the following adjustments should be made.

  • CPU
    • 16 cores / 32 threads, or more
  • RAM
    • 256 GB, or more
  • Disk
    • Consider a larger ledger disk if longer transaction history is required
    • Accounts and ledger should not be stored on the same disk

Virtual machines on Cloud Platforms​

While you can run a validator on a cloud computing platform, it may not be cost-efficient over the long term.

However, it may be convenient to run non-voting api nodes on VM instances for your own internal usage. This use case includes exchanges and services built on Velas.

In fact, the mainnet-beta validators operated by the team are currently (Mar. 2021) run on GCE n2-standard-32 (32 vCPUs, 128 GB memory) instances with 2048 GB SSD for operational convenience.

For other cloud platforms, select instance types with similar specs.

Also note that egress internet traffic usage may turn out to be high, especially for the case of running staked validators.

Docker​

Running validator for live clusters (including mainnet-beta) inside Docker is not recommended and generally not supported. This is due to concerns of general Docker's containerzation overhead and resultant performance degradation unless specially configured.

We use Docker only for development purposes.

Software​

  • We build and run on Ubuntu 20.04.
  • See Installing Velas for the current Velas software release.

Be sure to ensure that the machine used is not behind a residential NAT to avoid 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.

Prebuilt binaries are available for Linux x86_64 on CPUs supporting AVX2 (Ubuntu 20.04 recommended). MacOS or WSL users may build from source.

GPU Requirements​

CUDA is required to make use of the GPU on your system. The provided Velas release binaries are built on Ubuntu 20.04 with CUDA Toolkit 10.1 update 1. If your machine is using a different CUDA version then you will need to rebuild from source.

Networking​

Internet service should be at least 500 MB+it/s symmetric, commercial.