Clarity 2024 Host System Requirements and Prerequisites

Introduction

These prerequisites are required for all types of Clarity host.

This guide does not cover the full configuration and operation of the software – merely the host system requirements and prerequisites.

Hardware/Operating System Requirements

Clarity requires a server-class Windows Server operating system to be the central web server. 

A dedicated server is highly recommended.  Whether you will be using Revit Server in your environment or not, the prerequisites are the same for Clarity so the System requirements below should be referenced.

I highly recommend that you go with the Performance requirements, but no less than the Value for either circumstance of concurrent users.

Projects must be stored on a physical drive meeting the requirements below.  NAS or SAN devices will not work and they are also not supported by Autodesk at this time.  Please refer to the following Knowledge base articles for additional information

Hardware:

Hard drive space: 

Roughly 12 GB of free space for the Clarity installation, with substantial additions dependent on the amount and size of projects and tasks being utilized.

There is still a good amount of information that needs space on the C drive, even if the projects and cache are assigned to a different drive. 

Recommended Minimum

Minimum 500 GB C drive allocation to avoid issues later related to not enough hard drive space on the C drive.  Additional drive for Data (Projects, Artifacts, etc) if also being stored on the C drive.

We do not recommend that you install the Clarity Task Server software on the host since it is not a supported OS, but If you will also be using the host as a task server, additional drive space is required.

RAM: 

This is a difficult question, because it is dependent on the number of users, projects, and size of projects being managed. This is particularly important if the server is going to be performing Revit operations, the size of the Revit RAM requirement often dwarfs the other requirements.

Recommended Minimum

Minimum 16gb of ram on the host. 

Note:  If you plan on using the host as a task server, refer to the ram and hard drive space for Revit.

Virtualization

Most Clarity server deployments have taken place on Virtual Machines. Clarity supports VMware and Hyper-V based virtual machines. You must ensure that the virtual machine has sufficiently performing processor, memory, and disk resources for appropriate performance.

Note:

Anyone going with a Virtual setup should be asked how the IOPS performance of their setup would compare to the kind of physical drive Autodesk is looking for.

Microsoft SQL Server

Clarity 2024 provides Microsoft SQL Express 2017 as its database.  SQL Server Express limits the maximum database size to 10GB.

If you plan to have more than 100 active projects, you may wish to consider a full SQL Server license (or a separate SQL Server). Microsoft SQL Server version 2016 thru 2022 are supported.

We are often asked if it is permissible to use an existing full version of Microsoft SQL Server (on a corporate server). While this environment should work, it is not a fully tested configuration as of yet.

If this is an important issue, please raise it with your primary IMAGINiT contact.

Software/OS Prerequisites

Before deploying your Clarity Server, you must have the following prerequisite configuration set up for your Clarity Host.  The Revit Server prerequisites are required for all Clarity Host installations regardless of if you are going to be using Revit Server.

Please reference the following Autodesk article for installing prerequisites on Windows Server  2016 ,  2019  or 2022 are supported.  At the time of this posting, there are no instructions for Windows Server 2022.

Revit Server Installs (Optional)

  • If you are going to be using Revit Server with Clarity please install all necessary versions of Revit Server prior to the Clarity install and verify that you can get to the Revit Server admin without error.  Do not create any projects yet.

Autodesk Revit

  • If you are not using the host as a task server it is not necessary to install Revit.

User Identity

Because Clarity will likely need to access files on your network, you should decide in advance what UserId clarity should run under in order to give the appropriate permissions. 

By default, Clarity will run as a low-privilege system account on the local machine – but that account will likely not have sufficient access to retrieve files from the network.

To manage this access appropriately, IMAGINiT recommends defining a domain account for your “Clarity User” – which will define the permissions for the Clarity application.

This account should have local admin rights.

Please reference the Help link or the Clarity Security Principle Setup document for the complete steps to configure Clarity to use this “Clarity User” for the following:

  • CentralAdministrator Application Pools
  • Clarity Monitoring Windows Service
  • Microsoft SQL Server Database
  • Clarity ADSync
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