# How important is it \*really\* to have 2 servers?

**URL:** <https://community.graylog.org/t/how-important-is-it-really-to-have-2-servers/36695>\
**Category:** Graylog Central (peer support)\
**Tags:** capacity\_planning\
**Created:** [December 3, 2025, 3:51pm UTC](https://community.graylog.org/t/how-important-is-it-really-to-have-2-servers/36695 "2025-12-03T15:51:08Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Nchitech1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/50afbb/32.png) [@Nchitech1](https://community.graylog.org/u/Nchitech1)\
**Post date:** [December 3, 2025, 3:51pm UTC](https://community.graylog.org/t/how-important-is-it-really-to-have-2-servers/36695/1 "2025-12-03T15:51:08Z")

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Doing budget forecasting, planning to implement Graylog next year, and trying to estimate our hardware costs to do so. Our organization is very small, we anticipate only 5-10gb of log ingestion per day. The docs suggest that at that scale we ought to have 2 (physical!?) servers, one for Graylog with 8 cores and 16GB of RAM, and one for Data Node with 8 cores and 24GB of RAM. Is there any reason I shouldn’t just build one big hypervisor with enough cores and ram for both and spin up a VM for each of those?

Given that it’s hard to even find a server cpu with less than 12 cores, it kind of seems like the docs are written with the assumption I’ll be virtualizing, but I don’t know if there’s some other concern I’m missing. Thanks for your guidance!

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**1. Describe your incident:**

n/a

**2. Describe your environment:**

- TBD

**3. What steps have you already taken to try and solve the problem?**

Reading the manual

**4. How can the community help?**

Please sanity-check my understanding of this topic and explain if I’ve misunderstood something.

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**Author:** ![Wine\_Merchant](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex016/user_avatar/community.graylog.org/wine_merchant/32/14596_2.png) [@Wine\_Merchant](https://community.graylog.org/u/Wine_Merchant)\
**Post date:** [December 3, 2025, 4:03pm UTC](https://community.graylog.org/t/how-important-is-it-really-to-have-2-servers/36695/2 "2025-12-03T16:03:12Z")

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Hey @Nchitech1,

It’s guidance only, it helps for things like troubleshooting and resource contention. Given the ingest would be low a single server with a hypervisor installed would be the best route assuming redundancy is not something your after. That way you could potentially use any remaining compute for other tasks.

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**Author:** ![system](https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/flex016/uploads/graylog/original/3X/c/7/c7c09c6b5099570133d6502b83f50ba4430de5b6.png) [@system](https://community.graylog.org/u/system)\
**Post date:** [December 17, 2025, 4:03pm UTC](https://community.graylog.org/t/how-important-is-it-really-to-have-2-servers/36695/3 "2025-12-17T16:03:15Z")

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