According to the Splunk Enterprise Capacity Planning and Hardware Sizing Guidelines, a distributed Splunk environment’s minimum search head specification must ensure that the system can efficiently manage search parsing, ad-hoc query execution, and knowledge object replication. Splunk officially recommends using a 64-bit x86 architecture system with a minimum of two physical CPU cores (or four vCPUs) running at 2 GHz or higher per core for acceptable performance.
Search heads are CPU-intensive components, primarily constrained by processor speed and the number of concurrent searches they must handle. Memory and disk space should scale with user concurrency and search load, but CPU capability remains the baseline requirement. While 128 GB RAM (Option C) is suitable for high-demand or Enterprise Security (ES) deployments, it exceeds the minimum hardware specification for general distributed search environments.
Splunk no longer supports 32-bit architectures (Option B). While a 1Gb Ethernet NIC (Option A) is common, it is not part of the minimum computational specification required by Splunk for search heads. The critical specification is processor capability — two physical cores or equivalent.
References (Splunk Enterprise Documentation):
• Splunk Enterprise Capacity Planning Manual – Hardware and Performance Guidelines
• Search Head Sizing and System Requirements
• Distributed Deployment Manual – Recommended System Specifications
• Splunk Hardware and Performance Tuning Guide
