Agave Validator Requirements
Minimum SOL requirements
There is no strict minimum amount of SOL required to run an Agave validator on Solana.
However in order to participate in consensus, a vote account is required which has a rent-exempt reserve of 0.02685864 SOL. Voting also requires sending a vote transaction for each block the validator agrees with, which can cost up to 1.1 SOL per day.
Hardware Recommendations
The hardware recommendations below are provided as a guide. Operators are encouraged to do their own performance testing.
| Component | Validator Requirements | Additional RPC Node Requirements |
|---|---|---|
| CPU | - 2.8GHz base clock speed, or faster - SHA extensions instruction support - AMD Gen 3 or newer - Intel Ice Lake or newer - Higher clock speed is preferable over more cores - AVX2 instruction support (to use official release binaries, self-compile otherwise) - Support for AVX512f is helpful | |
| 12 cores / 24 threads, or more | 16 cores / 32 threads, or more | |
| RAM | Error Correction Code (ECC) memory is suggested Motherboard with 512GB capacity suggested | |
| 256GB or more | 512 GB or more for all account indexes | |
| Disk | PCIe Gen3 x4 NVME SSD, or better, on each of: - Accounts: 500GB, or larger. High TBW (Total Bytes Written) - Ledger: 1TB or larger. High TBW suggested - Snapshots: 250GB 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 | Consider a larger ledger disk if longer transaction history is required Accounts and ledger should not be stored on the same disk |
| GPUs | Not necessary at this time Operators in the validator community do not use GPUs currently |
A community maintained list of currently optimal hardware can be found here: solanahcl.org. It is updated automatically from the solanahcl/solanahcl Github repo.
Virtual machines on Cloud Platforms
Running an Agave node in the cloud requires significantly greater operational expertise to achieve stability and performance. Do not expect to find sympathetic voices should you chose this route and find yourself in need of support.
Docker
Running an Agave validator for live clusters (including mainnet-beta) inside Docker is not recommended and generally not supported. This is due to general concerns of Docker's containerization overhead and resultant performance degradation unless specially configured. We use Docker only for development purposes.
Software
- We build and run on Ubuntu 24.04.
- See Installing Solana CLI for the current Solana CLI software release.
Prebuilt binaries are currently available targeting x86_64 with AVX2 support on Ubuntu 20.04. We will stop publishing these in the near future (as of May 2025). Building from source is required for all other supported target platforms (MacOS and Windows) today and suggested for linux as it will soon be required there as well
Networking
Internet service should be at least 1GBbit/s symmetric, commercial. 10GBit/s preferred (especially for mainnet-beta).
Port Forwarding
The following ports need to be open to the internet for both inbound and outbound
It is not recommended to run a validator behind a NAT. Operators who choose to do so should be comfortable configuring their networking equipment and debugging any traversal issues on their own.
Required
- 8000-10000 TCP/UDP - P2P protocols (gossip, turbine, repair, etc). This can
be limited to any free 13 port range with
--dynamic-port-range
Optional
For security purposes, it is not suggested that the following ports be open to the internet on staked, mainnet-beta validators.
- 8899 TCP - JSONRPC over HTTP. Change with `--rpc-port RPC_PORT``
- 8900 TCP - JSONRPC over Websockets. Derived. Uses
RPC_PORT + 1