Skip to content

System requirements

OpsPilot is a desktop application, so the requirements below describe the workstation you install it on. Nothing is installed on the hosts you connect to. The table covers OpsPilot itself; running a local model on the same machine adds its own requirements, covered further down.

Minimum Recommended
OS Windows 10 22H2 / Windows 11 Windows 11
RAM 4 GB 8 GB or more
Disk 600 MB 1 GB
Display 1280 × 800 1600 × 1000 or wider
Network Reachability to your targets Plus outbound HTTPS to your AI provider, unless running local inference. Optional: HTTPS to license.nubestack.com, only if you activate online

OpsPilot needs to reach the hosts you want to operate, the way your existing tooling does. It does not need the hosts to reach anything. Outbound HTTPS to an AI provider is required only if you are using a cloud provider — with local inference, or with no AI configured at all, it is not.

Licensing needs no network unless you choose online activation. The free trial, offline activation with a license file and an organisation-wide deployment license all work with no connection at all. See Network requirements for the licensing connection in detail.

Platform support

Windows is the primary supported platform. The download page has the Windows x64 installer and, for Linux x64, a .deb package and an AppImage. macOS (Intel and Apple Silicon) builds are produced from the same codebase, but the macOS installers are not on the download page yet; email support@nubestack.com to hear when they are.

SSH, Telnet, RSH, Mosh, FTP, S3, hypervisor VNC consoles, the MCP connector and the AI features behave identically on all three. The one difference is remote desktop: on Windows an RDP session is embedded as an in-app tab, while on macOS and Linux it opens in an external client. The window-embedding interface the Windows behaviour depends on has no counterpart on macOS, and Wayland blocks cross-application embedding outright.

Remote desktop

RDP needs a client, and which one depends on the platform:

Platform RDP client You need to install
Windows Bundled FreeRDP, embedded as an in-app tab Nothing
macOS Microsoft's Windows App, launched with a generated .rdp file Windows App
Linux FreeRDP (xfreerdp or xfreerdp3), external window xfreerdp on your PATH

Only the Windows build bundles a FreeRDP binary, so "nothing extra to install" applies to Windows alone. On macOS, OpsPilot does not write the password into the generated .rdp file, so Windows App prompts for credentials.

The KVM and OpenStack hypervisor consoles are embedded in-app on all three platforms and need no external client. A direct VNC host opens in your system's VNC viewer.

Licensing

  • The free trial needs OpsPilot to be able to save its settings in your user profile, where it keeps the trial's start. On a locked-down desktop where it cannot, no trial starts: the terminal still works with up to 10 sessions open at once, and Settings → License says why. For evaluations on such machines, ask NubeStack (support@nubestack.com) for an evaluation license.
  • The computer's date and time should be correct. If the clock is wrong on first launch, the trial waits until it is corrected, so you still get all 15 days.
  • Online activation keeps a per-device secret in the operating system's secure storage. Windows and macOS always have it; on Linux it needs an unlocked keyring such as GNOME Keyring or KWallet. Without one, use offline activation instead.

Fully offline operation

"Fully offline" means the AI model runs on your workstation too, so no terminal content leaves the machine at all. That is a property of your model choice rather than a setting in OpsPilot, and it changes the hardware you need:

  • A small Ollama model such as llama3.2 (3B) runs on a 16 GB workstation without a GPU.
  • Larger models want a GPU and much more memory: llama3.3, the one OpsPilot's own setup text suggests, is a 70B model.

Those figures are for the model, on top of OpsPilot's own requirements — OpsPilot does not become heavier when you point it at a local endpoint. Small local models are less precise at diagnosis than the large cloud models, so test the model you intend to use against your own estate before committing to it.

Private or VPN-only is not air-gapped

With a cloud provider, your workstation still reaches the internet. That is private or VPN-only operation, and it is what most regulated teams need. Genuine air-gapped operation requires a local model, and an offline license file or an organisation-wide deployment license so that licensing needs no network either.

See also