Deployment Guidelines

concept

Before you install Couchbase Server, follow the recommended deployment guidelines for setting up your production environment.

Table 1. Couchbase Server Deployment Guidelines
Guideline	Description
Sizing	Evaluate the overall performance and capacity requirements of your deployment, and determine the hardware and other resources. Sizing Guidelines Services
Time keeping	Keeping accurate time is essential to a properly-functioning database. Ensure that you follow the guidelines for synchronizing each Couchbase node using Network Time Protocol (NTP). Clock Sync with NTP
Disable Transparent Huge Pages	You must disable the THP memory management system on each node that runs Couchbase Server. Disabling Transparent Huge Pages (THP)
Set kernel swappiness	The kernel swappiness setting defines how aggressively the kernel will swap memory pages versus dropping pages from the page cache. You need to set the swappiness setting to 0, or at most 1, for optimal Couchbase Server operation. Swap Space and Kernel Swappiness
Couchbase client deployment	Deploy client applications that incorporate Couchbase SDKs to enable interaction with Couchbase clusters. SDKs & Connectors
Security	Couchbase Server provides security features that allow administrators to implement various security controls to ensure secure deployment. You should take Couchbase security best practices into consideration before, during, and after deployment. Security Couchbase Server Processes
Virtualized and containerized deployments	Certain considerations must be made when you’re deploying Couchbase Server on a virtual machine or container. Deployment Considerations for Virtual Machines and Containers
Clusters with less than three nodes	Couchbase Server clusters with less than three nodes are not recommended in production. However, you might find a need to have a smaller deployment for test and development purposes. About Deploying Clusters With Less Than Three Nodes

General Guidelines

Disk Configuration: To reduce the likelihood of disk failure affecting data integrity, consider using a disk configuration such as RAID with mirroring (RAID 1, RAID10) or parity (RAID 5, 6) to ensure that a single disk failure does not lose data.

If bucket replicas are set to 2 or higher, the administrator might rely on database-level replication for data durability.

Linux OS

When deploying Couchbase Server on production Linux, you should use either the XFS or ext4 file system.

XFS is preferred because it provides more consistent latency (fairer scheduling) when multiple IO streams are accessing the file system, such as during Data Service compaction or when the working set exceeds the memory quota and the data is read from disk.
The Couchbase Linux installer requires the ability to create a normal local Unix user with the name couchbase, if such a user doesn’t already exist. This can be particularly important if you are using a directory service for user management, such as LDAP.

Windows OS

For Windows OS, use 64k allocation sizes on NTFS file systems.