# Control Machine CPU/Memory requirements for Ansible + Ara (NOT Tower)

**URL:** <https://forum.ansible.com/t/control-machine-cpu-memory-requirements-for-ansible-ara-not-tower/27944>\
**Category:** Ansible Project\
**Tags:** ubuntu\
**Created:** [July 4, 2018, 12:15am UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/control-machine-cpu-memory-requirements-for-ansible-ara-not-tower/27944 "2018-07-04T00:15:20Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 4\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Swati\_Tyagi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/f07891/32.png) [@Swati\_Tyagi](https://forum.ansible.com/u/Swati_Tyagi)\
**Post date:** [July 4, 2018, 12:15am UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/control-machine-cpu-memory-requirements-for-ansible-ara-not-tower/27944/1 "2018-07-04T00:15:20Z")

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Hi,  
I plan to run Ansible + Ara ([https://github.com/openstack/ara](https://github.com/openstack/ara)) on an Ubuntu 18.04 control machine in order to remotely configure and monitor hundreds to thousands of managed nodes potentially.

Could someone please point me towards a rough estimate of the Memory/CPU requirements of the control machine for this use case? The general tasks performed would be remote machine configuration (e.g. installing WordPress) and routine metrics monitoring after configuration is complete.

Note that I'm not referring to Tower here, which seems to be a pretty heavy app as per the system requirements found online.

Regards,  
Swati Tyagi

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**Author:** ![cava\_cavamagie](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/e68b1a/32.png) [@cava\_cavamagie](https://forum.ansible.com/u/cava_cavamagie)\
**Post date:** [July 4, 2018, 8:05am UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/control-machine-cpu-memory-requirements-for-ansible-ara-not-tower/27944/2 "2018-07-04T08:05:38Z")

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i’m curious why **ara** and not **awx**??

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**Author:** ![Swati\_Tyagi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/f07891/32.png) [@Swati\_Tyagi](https://forum.ansible.com/u/Swati_Tyagi)\
**Post date:** [July 4, 2018, 9:44am UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/control-machine-cpu-memory-requirements-for-ansible-ara-not-tower/27944/3 "2018-07-04T09:44:44Z")

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AWX sounds like a very heavy app, since Tower requires 4Gb to 6Gb of RAM to run. That’ll be quite expensive on AWS or other cloud platforms (where I want to deploy). Furthermore, having a full blown web application in my stack will increase the vulnerability risk area, which I want to avoid by going with ara.

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**Author:** ![system](https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/ansible/original/1X/1882d9a01da5d8996a862359b0913cc568a39b84.svg) [@system](https://forum.ansible.com/u/system)\
**Post date:** [July 11, 2018, 10:28pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/control-machine-cpu-memory-requirements-for-ansible-ara-not-tower/27944/4 "2018-07-11T22:28:14Z")

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These are very diff things, Ara is (basically) 'reporting' on Ansible  
executions which include the Ara callback/  
AWX/Tower is a web application that manages execution of Ansible,  
with RBAC, audit, workflows, 3rd party integrations, etc.

AWX/Tower also does reporting but it does not report on 'external  
Ansible executions', that is what Ara does (if you run the callback).

Many people use both at the same time, they are not exclusive of each  
other, which one to choose depends on your needs.