Hardware and Operating System Recommendations

The Alexandria v7 Server (Data Station) is cross-platform and available for both Macintosh and Windows operating systems; interfaces are accessible via HTML5-compliant web browsers such as Chrome, Firefox, Safari, or Internet Explorer—or mobile devices, laptops, and tablets such as Apple’s iPad, Google’s Chromebook, and others.

If you are Cloud Hosting your server with COMPanion, the only requirement is a supported Web Browser as documented below.

The general rule is that we support the 3 most recent MacOS and Windows operating systems for the Data Station with the specific systems documented below.

*Alexandria is currently a 32 bit application and is currently NOT supported on 64 bit Operating Systems.

RAM Recommendations for 1-30 Site systems

1- 5 Sites: 8 GB or more
6-20 Sites: 12 GB or more
21-30+ Sites: 16 GB or more
For configurations managing more than 30 Sites, contact the COMPanion Sales Department at 1-800-347-6439 for specific recommendations. More memory will often improve performance from OS caching. 

COMPanion recommends using Solid State Drives (SSD's) for the OS and Data on all Controllers and Data Stations. Database applications such as Alexandria are disk intensive and with solid state drives, performance is greatly enhanced. For additional safety, configure a matched pair of SSDs as Mirrored RAID drives

As with all important systems, don’t let the primary drive space run out, or data corruption and loss of service may occur. On our systems, we get nervous when there is less than 40GB of free space

A separate Archive drive is useful for Archives and saves the space on the SSD for more important tasks.

The Alexandria Data Station has NO integrated UI, and can be run as a Service on both MacOS and Windows systems. You must use a web browser to manage and use the Server.

Other Recommendations

A minimum screen resolution of 1024 x 768 is supported for all interfaces. Some interfaces support dynamically sized resolutions for Phones, Tablets, Laptops and Desktop systems which are smaller or larger than the minimum.

Our standard report format is PDF; we recommend using the latest version of Preview on MacOS or Adobe Reader on all Platforms to print labels, view reports, and notices.

Back to Top

Running a Controller on a Virtual Machine 

We don’t recommend running Alexandria Data Stations or Controllers on virtual machines, and do not test under that configuration.

The Alexandria server contains the equivalent of a Web Server, SQL Database Server and File Server in one executable along with all the additional application logic. The Controller creates and manages multiple Data Stations with a single executable, so the system is running multiple Servers controlled by the one Controller.

While we don't test or recommend Alexandria on virtual machines, some customers are running in a virtual environment. If you choose to run Alexandria on a virtual machine, because of the extra overhead of a Virtual environment, having sufficient Memory is important. Add about 50% more to the non virtual recommendations.

Since the Server is sharing with other applications, it’s even more important to use an SSD as the primary boot drive and to store your Alexandria data.

The virtual machine running Alexandria should be allocated the same number of cores as the Simultaneous Tasks setting in the Controller “Configuration.txt” file. That is, if you have allocated 4 cores, the Simultaneous Tasks setting should be set to "4".

Configuring your VM to work with Alexandria requires skill and knowledge of the VM system you are using, which our Customer Support team does pretend to have. Configuring the system incorrectly will result in poor performance of the Alexandria Server resulting in your users dissatisfaction.

Back to Top

Alexandria® Web (i.e. Client) Interfaces

We generally support the two most recent versions of the following browsers:

• Safari
• Firefox
• Chrome
• Edge
• Internet Explorer (not recommended)

Back to Top