Technical Specifications

This document outlines the requirements for the NGINX Management Suite and NGINX Agent, such as compatible platforms, hardware specifications, sizing advice, compatible web browsers, and more.

Overview

The NGINX Management Suite is a comprehensive family of management plane solutions that enable you to effectively scale, secure, and monitor your applications and APIs. At its core is the NGINX Management Suite Instance Manager module, which lets you track, secure, and configure your NGINX OSS and NGINX Plus instances. Instance Manager is available as a standalone product and is automatically included when you license any other NGINX Management Suite modules.

NGINX Management Suite

The guidelines in this section are applicable to the entire NGINX Management Suite gateway. Further, module-specific guidelines are highlighted in the respective sections of this document.

Support for Prior Releases

Unless otherwise specified in the release notes, F5 NGINX typically supports the three most recent releases of Instance Manager, API Connectivity Manager, and NGINX App Protect WAF. This means, for example, if the latest release of Instance Manager is 2.11.0, F5 NGINX would support versions ranging from 2.8.0 to 2.11.0. The same principle applies to the other modules.

If you are using an older version of a module, you might need to upgrade to an intermediate version before upgrading to the final version you want. Make sure to follow the recommended upgrade paths mentioned in each module’s release notes for a successful upgrade process. For more detailed information and guidance on the upgrade process, you can refer to the Upgrade Guide.

Module release notes:

• Instance Manager
• NGINX App Protect WAF

Supported Linux Distributions

The NGINX Management Suite gateway supports the following Linux distributions:

Supported Deployment Environments

You can deploy the NGINX Management Suite gateway in the following environments:

• Bare Metal
• Container
• Public Cloud: AWS, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure
• Virtual Machine

Supported NGINX Versions

NGINX Management Suite supports the following NGINX versions:

Firewall Ports

The NGINX Management Suite and NGINX Agent services use the Unix domain socket by default and proxy through the gateway on port 443.

Supported Browsers

The NGINX Management Suite web interface works best on the newest versions of these browsers:

• Google Chrome
• Firefox
• Safari
• Microsoft Edge

Logging

The NGINX Management Suite stores its log files in /var/log/nms. To prevent your system from running out of disk space due to log growth, we suggest creating a separate partition for the logs or enabling log rotation.

Instance Manager

Sizing Recommendations

The following sizing recommendations are the minimum sizing guidelines for Instance Manager. For improved performance, we strongly suggest using SSDs as your storage option.

Standard NGINX Configuration Deployments

The following sizing guidelines are for Instance Manager deployments with data plane instances that have standard configurations; that is, up to 40 upstream servers with associated location and server blocks and up to 350 associated certificates.

We recommend using solid-state drives (SSDs) for better storage performance.

Large NGINX Configuration Deployments

The following sizing guidelines are for Instance Manager deployments with data plane instances that have large configurations; that is, up to 300 upstream servers with associated location and server blocks.

Support for NGINX App Protect WAF

Instance Manager supports the following versions of NGINX App Protect WAF:

Security Monitoring Module

Dependencies with Instance Manager

The Security Monitoring module requires the following versions of Instance Manager to be installed on the management plane:

Important:
The Security Monitoring module installation does not automatically install or upgrade Instance Manager. You’ll need to manually install Instance Manager, or upgrade it to a version supported for use with Security Monitoring.

Dependencies with NGINX App Protect WAF and NGINX Plus

The Security Monitoring module requires the following versions of NGINX App Protect WAF and NGINX Plus for the data plane:

NGINX Agent (Data Plane)

Supported Distributions

The NGINX Agent can run on most environments. For the supported distributions, see the NGINX Agent Technical Specs guide.