Server requirements


This document is intended for Server Administrators with sufficient technical skills. 

It is required that XTRF Language Business Platform is the only software running on the server. Please avoid running any other Web applications on this server, especially:

  • Internet Information Services

  • PHP/Apache

  • Control panels such as:

    • Plesk

    • DirectAdmin

    • cPanel

    • Webmin

The Web applications may interfere with the XTRF Platform and cause security risks or service disruption. Moreover, the GDPR requirements do not allow us to provide remote support to your server if there is any other personal information being processed.

 

XTRF Platform is a Java-based web application that can be available in one of the following options:  

  • You can install the XTRF Platform on your local machines. This article presents a list of requirements for running the XTRF Platform.

  • You may also have your XTRF Platform as an on-cloud service. In that case, all maintenance is on the XTRF team's side, including testing, monitoring, and upgrading. To apply for this solution, contact the XTRF Team.

To contact the XTRF team go to the XTRF main page: https://xtrf.eu/contact-us/ and fill in the on-line form available there.

 

Server administrators can use this guide to get an overview of the hardware and software requirements necessary for your XTRF Platform. While planning the infrastructure, you need to take into account how many users will be accessing the available XTRF portals: Home Portal, Client Portal, or Vendor Portal. You should estimate how many peak visitors you have to get the maximum number of browsers simultaneously making requests to access. Users are counted from their first page request until the connection is closed. Remember that the storage requirements vary depending on how many files and other resources you want to store on the XTRF Platform.

Please bear in mind that this is only guidance, and your configuration may require more resources at your discretion.

Please note that:

  • It is not possible to upload the XTRF Platform using the File Transfer Protocol (FTP)

  • It is not possible to use popular "web hosting" services

Hardware Requirements

The hardware requirements depend on the number of visitors accessing XTRF Language Business Platform at a given moment (concurrent active users). Please find below the infrastructure recommendations for your installation of the XTRF Platform.

XTRF Platform on Virtual Machine

If you use virtualization, please notice that you should assign an entire processor to the XTRF virtual machine (VM), not a single core. Additionally, please bear in mind that sharing resources between multiple VMs decreases the XTRF Platform performance.


Basic Installation

The requirements in the following section apply to the installation where there are up to 10 concurrent users:

Component

Requirement

Processor

It is required to use a modern multicore processor:

  • Intel Core i5 or higher

  • AMD: Zen microarchitecture or newer

It is recommended that the CPU is not older than 5 years. The single core performance of processor is more important than core count or hyper-threading. Please compare your CPUs on https://www.cpubenchmark.net/ and aim for single core score over 2500.

RAM

16GB or more, desktop or rack server.

Hard disk

Dual in RAID1, SSD disks strongly recommended.


Medium-sized Installation

 When planning infrastructure for medium-scale XTRF Platform deployment, please bear in mind the following partial requirements:

  • PostgreSQL database requires:

    • CPU: Fast

    • RAM: 4GB or more

    • Hard disk: Several GB on a fast hard disk, SSD/NVMe is strongly recommended

  • XTRF/JBoss application requires:

    • CPU: As fast as you can get (single-core performance)

    • RAM: At least 16GB is required; 24 GB is recommended

    • Hard disk: 100 GB free space for the application and logs

  • Storage:

    • File storage requires a medium to big redundant hard disk, preferably with a spare (RAID) and backup. This is used for project files and database backups.

All of the above can be fulfilled by a single server, and that's a recommended solution.


Concurrent Users

If there are up to 30 concurrent users, you can run the entire application on a single server-class type motherboard; the following requirements must be fulfilled: 

Component

Requirement

Processor

  • Intel i7-class processor

  • AMD Zen microarchitecture or newer  

It is recommended that the CPU is not older than 5 years. The single core performance of processor is more important than core count or hyper-threading. Please compare your CPUs on https://www.cpubenchmark.net/ and aim for single core score over 2200.

RAM

32GB

Hard disk

Triple, RAID1 with spare for file storage 

Disk for operating system and database

Double SSD


Concurrent Users

If you have more than 30 concurrent users but up to 50, you can use a server with the following specifications:

Component

Requirement

Component

Requirement

CPU

  • Intel i7-class processor or higher

  • AMD Zen microarchitecture or newer  

It is recommended that the CPU is not older than 5 years. The single core performance of processor is more important than core count or hyper-threading. Please compare your CPUs on https://www.cpubenchmark.net/ and aim for single core score over 3000.

RAM

32GB

Hard disk

For database storage: SSD or battery backed hardware RAID.  

For projects storage: At least two hard disks are required in one of the RAID configuration:

  • RAID 1

  • RAID 5

  • RAID 6

  • RAID 1+0

 You can use the existing company storage solution, but the data storage has to be reachable from the application server as a direct file storage (no VFS support in XTRF).


 Large Instances

For large instances, contacting the XTRF Management Support team for expertise on hardware sizing, testing, and performance tuning may be worthwhile. Simply contact our Support team for a recommendation.

You should prepare a staging/testing environment first to understand your resource utilization, given your specific product requirements and workflows.


Other Hardware Requirements

Disk Space

If you intend to install the XTRF Platform on the existing server or on a virtual private server (VPS), please note that it requires at least 100 GB of free disk space. This requirement does not include the space for your translation projects, where the size of the stored files might be even 1 TB or more if your company translates large files.

Internet Connection

XTRF Language Business Platform, as a Web application, requires fast Internet access. This includes both browser access and, optionally, FTP for transferring project files. If you are hosting the XTRF Platform in your translation office, it is recommended that you have at least a broadband, symmetric bandwidth connection with a 10 Mbps link in both directions. Note that you may notice slowdowns or periodical packet loss with a smaller bandwidth.

Accessing the system from the Internet requires having a public, routable IP address and a domain name.

Network Topology

When planning your XTRF Platform's architecture, you need to take into account that the distributed system may cause additional delays. Therefore, locating a database server as close as possible to an application server to reduce any additional delays is advisable, as connection latency significantly impacts the application performance.


Software Requirements

The below sections cover the software requirements specifications for the XTRF Language Business Platform. 

Operating System

XTRF Language Business Platform should run on Debian Linux (or derivatives). Microsoft Windows Server is still supported but is not recommended.

It is highly recommended to set up the English language version of the operating system.

It is recommended that your antivirus software is either disabled or the database directories are excluded, as it is known to cause serious performance degradation.

Operating System

Description

Linux

The Debian OS or it's derivatives such as Ubuntu LTS should be used. XTRF Language Business Platform is delivered as the .deb packages facilitating automatic dependency installation, backups and easy upgrades.

  • For Debian, at version 11 [Bullseye] is recommended (version 9 [Stretch] is not supported since XTRF 9.3)

    • For Ubuntu LTS, at least version 20.04 is recommended. XTRF has been tested on 18.04, 20.04 and 22.04.. Please avoid the non-LTS version. Please note that Ubuntu 16.04 is no longer supported and you should upgrade.

Please notice that we required Postgresql version at least 11 for XTRF 9. With XTRF 10, Postgresql >=13 will be required.

It is recommended to use the remote control software to enable the XTRF experts to log in if there is an immediate action on the server necessary. For Linux systems a direct SSH access with root permissions is required. For more details, see Remote access to a server.

Windows

At least the Windows Server 2012 operating system is required. Due to lack of automation and other issues, Windows server is not recommended anymore.

It is recommended to use the direct remote control software to enable the XTRF experts to log in if there is an immediate action on the server necessary. For more details, see Remote access to a server.

Please note that the Microsoft licensing model does not allow for multi-user applications on the desktop-class operating systems, for example on Windows 10 OS. Please refer to the Microsoft licensing:

We do not provide any support for operating systems other than the ones listed above.


Database

A PostgreSQL database is required to run the XTRF Language Business Platform. The PostgreSQL database is an open-source object-relational database system that is very reliable and extensible.

Please note that the XTRF Platform is not compatible with MySQL, MSSQL, Oracle, and other databases.

Database

Version

Database

Version

PostgreSQL

Version 13 or higher, 64-bit is required. To download the installation files depending on your operating system, go to the PostgreSQL official website:

XTRF has been tested with Postgresql release 13 and it is the recommended version. With XTRF 10, Postgresql >=13 will be required.

 


Java

XTRF Language Business Platform is a Java-based Web application. XTRF Platform uses Java Runtime Environment (JRE) version 8, which is bundled with XTRF 9 for Windows and automatically installed on Debian servers.

Firewall settings - open ports

XTRF requires opening a few TCP ports on a strictly blocking firewall. Depending on the configuration, the ports are:

For inbound traffic

  • TCP 443 - standard HTTPS communication between the browser and the proxy server - usually, this is the only port that needs to be open to clients.

  • TCP 8443 - standard HTTPS internal port of xtrf-jboss application (mainly used by the proxy server if https is used as the backend protocol or if clients connect directly to the jboss-xtrf application), should not be publicly exposed.

  • TCP 8009 - standard AJP internal port of xtrf-jboss application (mainly used by the proxy server if ajp is used as the backend protocol), should not be publicly exposed.

For outbound traffic

  • Mandatory:

    • TCP licence.radzisz.com:8448, TCP licence.radzisz.com:8449, TCP v1.endpoint.license.xtrf.eu:443 - XTRF's license server. You may verify the connectivity by opening  on your server.

    • TCP 5432 - standard port of the postgresql server (used by the xtrf-jboss application to connect to the database), only if connecting to a database on a remote server

    • Google Cloud Platform services (for Chat related features)

    • SMTP connection depending on your e-mail provider (for sending emails)

  • Optional

    • TCP "xtrf_trados_agent":8081 - The XTRF Trados agent  - replace "xtrf_trados_agent" with the IP or DNS name of the host which hosts the agent instance (only if Trados integration is used)

    • TCP "memoq_server":8080 or TCP "memoq_server":8443 - default memoQ server web connector ports (only if memoQ integration is used)

    • Other third-party services depending on individual integrations

Additional remarks

  • DNS is required to operate correctly

  • NTP is required to keep time synchronized

  • Local hostname must be resolvable for the e-mail to work correctly

  • We strongly recommend exposing XTRF web application through HTTPS proxy on a standard 443 port