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. Also, an official release for Macintosh OS X 10.9 and later is provided 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:

Sun Java SDK 8 is recommended, but OpenJDK 8 is also supported. Note that although the VoltDB server requires Java 8, the Java client is also compatible with Java 7.

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, is 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 NTP” for details) and in cloud instances where hosted servers are run in a virtual environment, NTP is not always installed or enabled by default. Therefore you need to do this manually.

Finally, VoltDB implements its command line interface through Python. Python 2.4 or later is required to use the VoltDB shell commands.