Requirements and sizing

CID222 ships as one virtual appliance and one build. The licence file, not the image, decides which package you run, so sizing is a question about the host, not about the tier you bought. This page gives the numbers to allocate before you import anything.

The problem

Undersizing is the most common cause of a failed evaluation, and it does not fail where you are looking. Every container pulls and starts, the dashboard comes up, and an hour later services are killed one at a time as memory runs out — the console reports 2/10 running with no explanation. The installer's own comments say exactly this, which is why it now checks memory and disk before it downloads anything.

One build, three packages

Starter, Professional and Enterprise are strict supersets of one another. There is only one release image; the .lic file you upload unlocks the package you purchased, so moving up a package is a licence re-issue, never a reinstall.

The exact feature key each tier grants, and what a missing key switches off, is generated from the code in licence tiers and feature keys. Treat that table as authoritative: the package comparison printed in the customer install guide predates several core keys and does not list compliance, governance or endpoint-agent administration at all, although the code grants them to every tier.

Hardware per package

Every package runs the same container stack, so the supported minimum is the same for all three. What changes with the package is the recommended sizing.

The basis for the 32 GB floor is measurable rather than conventional. The 19 services that start without a compose profile declare 37.6 GB of memory limits between them, six of those services declare no limit at all — so that total is a floor rather than a ceiling — and the full stack was measured running at around 30 GiB. A host with less than roughly 32 GB free after its own overhead cannot run this appliance.

The shipped OVA is pre-sized at 32 GB RAM and 8 vCPU — the supported minimum — so it powers on correctly with no operator arithmetic. Raise it to your package's recommended profile before the first power-on.

Per-service memory limits and published ports are generated from the compose file in services, ports and profiles.

What the GPU buys, and what it does not

A GPU is recommended, never required. It matters only for document, OCR and image-heavy work: PaddleOCR on an NVIDIA card is roughly 3 to 8 times faster per image, and the highest-accuracy OCR engine runs only on a GPU. Text-only evaluation — PII, toxicity, jailbreak and prompt injection — needs no GPU. Hallucination detection and detailed risk analysis are CPU-only builds.

Host prerequisites, when you do add one: Linux, an NVIDIA GPU with driver 530 or later, and the NVIDIA Container Toolkit.

Hypervisors

The appliance is delivered as a single .ova file, or as an installer ISO for bare metal and for a virtual machine you build yourself.

The appliance also reports which platform it believes it is running on, in its diagnostics snapshot. That detection is reliable for VMware and Hyper-V and unreliable for Proxmox, which does not identify itself to a guest — see Install on Proxmox VE.

Firmware and boot

The OVF descriptor sets no EFI flag, so a host importing the OVA defaults to BIOS firmware, which is how the image is built and verified. The installer ISO carries both the BIOS and the UEFI boot images of its Ubuntu base and boots either way; its menu offers a UEFI firmware settings entry only when it was itself started in UEFI mode.

Browser

The dashboard is a React single-page application served over HTTPS.

• Serve it over HTTPS. The dashboard sends a Content-Security-Policy: upgrade-insecure-requests header, so a browser opening an appliance by plain HTTP upgrades every asset request to HTTPS. On an ISO-installed appliance, which is HTTPS-only, that works; on a deployment with no HTTPS listener the page renders blank rather than erroring.
• Trust the appliance certificate. A first-boot appliance serves a self-signed certificate and the browser shows a one-time warning. The browser extension and Claude Code refuse an untrusted certificate outright rather than warning.

What the first-boot check actually enforces

An appliance installed from the ISO checks memory and free disk on tty1 before it downloads a single image, and again on every retry boot. The thresholds are in the first-boot script:

The same first-boot pass also nudges time synchronisation before it contacts the registry, because a wrong clock makes a valid certificate look invalid and the resulting error reads like a network fault.

Limits and known gaps

• The installer's resource check is weaker than the supported minimum. It fails at 6 GB and warns at about 15 GB, against a documented floor of 32 GB. It catches the machine that cannot work at all, not the machine that will disappoint you.
• Memory limits are declared for some services and not others. Six services in the default profile declare no limit, so the declared total is a floor rather than a ceiling, and a host running out of memory is not diagnosable from the compose file alone. Older CID222 documents quote about 42 GB of declared limits; the figure generated from the current compose file is 37.6 GB, and that generated figure is the one to trust.
• A GPU cannot be added to a shipped appliance. The GPU paths exist only in the source compose overlays, which the appliance image does not carry.
• Cloud model providers still require egress. The detection pipeline runs entirely locally, but the Anthropic and Google provider clients dial their vendor cloud with no configurable base URL. An air-gapped appliance therefore reaches a self-hosted or LAN model, or no model at all — see Network prerequisites.
• Capacity per user is not published. No throughput or concurrent-user figure has been measured on customer hardware, so the sizing above is a floor for the stack, not a capacity model for your population.

Related tasks

• Network prerequisites — the ports, egress and name resolution to agree with the network team before the virtual machine exists.
• Install on a hypervisor — import the OVA with the right sizing, disk and adapter.
• Install from the ISO — bare metal, or a virtual machine you build yourself.