Home Lab/Network ELK Stack Hardware Requirements

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Hi All,

Brand new to to the Elk Stack and I've been reading/lurking through lots of different stuff and my brain is getting fried as i can't seem to find information specific enough to a home lab. Any information would be appreciated!!

Goal: set up home lab environment to begin playing around.

  • Home environment has a FW, Linux server, a couple endpoints and various wireless devices (haven't done to much research on this)

My question/problem: What do I run the ELK stack on for a small environment like this. Do I use a standalone server running Ubuntu (I see that 64GB ram is recommended. with 16GM being minimum) or will an old dusty laptops(s) suffice or can i use a single host with multiple VM's? I believe what's confusing me is all the moving parts within the stack (logstash, kibana etc.). Overall how many host's or guest os's are needed to run the stack? How does this work and what are you all running? as a side-note I'm low on $$ so would like to accomplish this fairly cheap but still have a reasonable environment Thanks in advance! I apologize if this has been covered, if so please just direct me to the url.

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For a small install, you don't need anything fancy. A machine with 8G RAM should be sufficient to host a single ES node, a logstash instance, and Kibana. If you want to do more than a little, then more hardware would, of course, help.

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@theuntergeek ,

Thanks for the quick answer. Are you saying a single host with three VM's, one for each > I may be looking at this from a networking perspective when i don't necessarily need to? This is what is throwing me off, I think. From what I "think" I know, they are all separate apps. And if so, does host OS matter?

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I was just suggesting downloading the components and uncompressing them on a single box, but sure, VMs is cool too (or Docker).

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