System Requirements

Before deploying Tula, verify that your environment meets the following hardware and software requirements. These specifications apply to physical appliances, virtual machines, and cloud instances alike.

Hardware Requirements

CPU

Tula requires a minimum of 1 CPU core for evaluation environments. For production deployments, 2 or more cores are recommended. Layer 7 load balancing with SSL termination is CPU-intensive, so environments handling high volumes of HTTPS traffic should allocate additional cores accordingly. Layer 4 load balancing via nftlb operates within the kernel networking stack and places minimal demand on the CPU.

Memory

A minimum of 2 GB of RAM is required to run Tula and its underlying services. For production workloads, 4 GB or more is recommended. Memory consumption scales with the number of active connections, SSL session caches, and the complexity of your HAProxy and nftlb configurations. Environments serving thousands of concurrent connections should provision additional memory to avoid resource contention.

Disk

Tula requires a minimum of 20 GB of disk space. This accommodates the operating system, Tula packages, SSL certificates, RRDtool statistics databases, and log files. If you plan to retain extended historical statistics or verbose logging, allocate additional storage. SSD-backed storage is recommended for improved I/O performance, particularly when writing statistics data.

Network

At least one network interface card (NIC) is required. Most production deployments use two or more NICs to separate management traffic from load-balanced traffic. For high-availability configurations using keepalived with VRRP, all cluster nodes must share a common Layer 2 broadcast domain on their VRRP-enabled interfaces. Tula supports bonded interfaces and VLAN tagging for environments that require link aggregation or network segmentation.

Software Requirements

Supported Operating Systems

Tula is supported on the following Linux distributions:

Ubuntu LTS releases are the only supported platform. Tula relies on specific versions of system packages including HAProxy, nftables, keepalived, gdnsd, and netplan that are tested and validated against these distributions.

Browser Requirements

The Tula web management interface (NetMan) requires a modern web browser. The following browsers are supported:

• Google Chrome 90 or later
• Mozilla Firefox 90 or later
• Microsoft Edge 90 or later
• Safari 15 or later

JavaScript must be enabled. The interface is responsive and functions on tablet-sized screens and above, though a desktop browser is recommended for day-to-day administration.

Virtual and Cloud Environments

Tula is available as an OVA virtual appliance compatible with VMware vSphere, ESXi, and other OVF-compatible hypervisors. When deploying in virtualized environments, ensure that hardware resources are reserved rather than overcommitted, particularly for CPU and network I/O. For cloud deployments, select instance types that provide dedicated network bandwidth to avoid noisy-neighbor effects on load balancing performance.

Next Steps

Once you have confirmed your environment meets these requirements, proceed to the Installation guide.