To start, VoltDB requires a recent release of the Linux operating system. The supported operating systems for running production VoltDB databases are:

It may be possible to run VoltDB on other versions of Linux and Macintosh OS X 11.0 and later is supported for development purposes. However, the preceding operating system versions are the only fully tested and supported base platforms for running VoltDB in production.

In addition to the base operating system, VoltDB requires the following software at a minimum:

Oracle Java SDK 11, 17, or 21 is recommended, but OpenJDK 11, 17, or 21 are also supported.

VoltDB works best when the system clocks on all cluster nodes are synchronized to within 100 milliseconds or less. However, the clocks are allowed to differ by up to 200 milliseconds before VoltDB refuses to start. NTP, the Network Time Protocol, or chrony are recommended for achieving the necessary synchronization. NTP is installed and enabled by default on many operating systems. However, the configuration may need adjusting (see Section 2.5, “Configure Time Services” for details) and in cloud instances where hosted servers are run in a virtual environment, a time service may not be installed or enabled by default. Therefore you need to do this manually.

Finally, VoltDB implements its command line interface through Python. Python 3.9 or later is required to use the VoltDB shell commands.