The GoldenGate binaries only consume around 50MB of disk space; however, each GoldenGate instance can support up to 300 concurrent Extract and Replicat processes (inclusive). Each process consumes around 50MB of memory. So, if you plan on using the maximum number of processes, you will need at least 16GB of physical memory to support not only GoldenGate, but have enough system resources available for the OS. If you have an Oracle Instance running on the same machine (which is highly likely), additional memory will be required. Most modern day enterprise specification database servers have at least 32GB of physical RAM.

Let's consider the CPU requirements. GoldenGate will use 1 CPU core per Extract or Replicat process. However, having a large number of CPUs available is both very expensive and not necessary, as GoldenGate will typically use only 5% of a systems CPU resource. Modern Operating Systems can share available resources very efficiently; the machine will not necessarily become CPU bound. It is important however to size your requirements effectively, obtaining a balance between the maximum possible number of concurrent processes and number of CPUs.

In your GoldenGate environment, you may find that CPU and memory are not the performance bottlenecks. After all, modern CPUs can process data very quickly and GoldenGate may actually be waiting to send data across the network. Therefore, ensure you have a fast network between your source and target systems. If the network between sites is a WAN, the bandwidth may not be available for high performance data transfer. In this case, you could reduce the CPU requirement to alleviate the network bottleneck.

GoldenGate requires a number of TCP/IP ports in which to operate. It is important that your network firewall is allowed to pass traffic on these ports. One port is used solely for communication between the Manager process and other GoldenGate processes. This is normally set to port 7809 but can be changed. A range of other ports are for local GoldenGate communications. These can be the default range starting at port 7840 or a predefined range of up to 256 other ports.

The final hardware requirement is disk space. Firstly, the GoldenGate cache manager uses the OS memory management functions, paging least-used information to disk and allocating virtual memory (VM) on demand. This operation uses disk space, swapping data out to temporary files in the dirtmp subdirectory. To calculate the required swap space, obtain the value of PROCESS VM AVAIL FROM OS (min) from the Extract or Replicat report files and multiply by the number of concurrent processes.

Secondly, an additional 40 MB of disk space is required for the working directories of each GoldenGate instance, plus at least 1GB for the trail files.