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Version: 4.0.0-rc1

Requirements

Hardware

The generic requirements for hardware to be assigned to the virtual appliance are as follows. The actual requirements may vary due to the wide variety of possible configurations in terms of included technologies, used models, optional GPU usage, etc.

  • x86_64 compatible processor
  • 60 GB of disk space
  • 4 CPU cores
  • 32 GB of RAM
  • NVIDIA GPU with at least 8 GB VRAM and CUDA compute capability at least 7
Note

The actual requirements depend on chosen set of included technologies and models, on actual processed media files, and also on further configuration according to required processing throughput.

Typically,

  • more CPU cores and more RAM are required for parallel processing by multiple technologies
  • more GPU VRAM is required for running multiple technologies on GPU

To assess the actual requirements it's necessary to perform own tests using media files corresponding to the planned use case and find the optimal configuration settings.

Software

  • hypervisor for running the virtual appliance
  • DHCP-assigned IP addresses
  • additional requirements apply for GPU support:
    • IOMMU (Intel VT-d, AMD-Vi) support in both machine HW and BIOS/UEFI
    • Host OS must be able to NOT use the GPU device, so it can be passed to the virtualization platform
    • GPU Passthrough support in virtualization platform (PCIe Passthrough) - see table below

GPU

The GPU is really required for Enhanced Speech to Text Built on Whisper technology to get reasonable performance.
We discourage from using this technology purely on CPU as the transcription speed is then hardly bearable - e.g., a 1 minute long audio takes about 10 minutes to transcribe - and without extra reconfiguration of numerous settings leads to various obscure errors.

Other technologies do not require GPU and run reasonably fast on CPU only. However, using GPU significantly increases the processing speed.

Hypervisor                            GPU Passthrough capableNote
Oracle VirtualBox
VMWare Workstation Pro
VMWare ESXiSince version 8.0 U3e available for free (with limitations, e.g. maximum 8 vCPU per VM)
Microsoft Hyper-VOnly in Windows Server, not possible in Windows 10/11
Proxmox
KVM