Before you start

What goes where

Raylux is Nexus plus clients. Plan Nexus first — everything else connects to it.

Machine	Install	Notes
Nexus server	Raylux Nexus	One per site. Runs continuously as a service. This is the machine that talks to the PLCs.
Engineering workstation	Raylux Studio	One per engineer. Does not need to be the Nexus machine.
Operator machine	nothing	Operators open a browser and point it at Nexus.
Plant-floor panel	Raylux Lens	Only if the panel has no desktop or must not show one. Otherwise use a browser.

You can install Studio on the Nexus machine as well — the Windows installer offers it — but on a production install it is usually left out.

Nexus requirements

Windows

• Windows Server 2019 or later, or Windows 10/11 (64-bit).
• Administrator rights to install.
• ~1.5 GB of disk for the program, plus room for the historian, which grows with your tag count and logging rate.

Linux

• Ubuntu 24.04 or later, or Debian 13 or later, for the .deb; Fedora 39 or later, or RHEL, Rocky or Alma 10 or later, for the .rpm. Both are x86-64. Other distributions build from source.
• sudo rights to install.
• ~600 MB of disk for the program, plus room for the historian.

Nexus installs under /opt/raylux and carries its own Python runtime, so there is nothing to install alongside it. There is no container image on x86-64. See Install on Linux.

Sizing

There is no published sizing table yet, and inventing one would be worse than saying so. As a starting point, a Nexus instance polling a few thousand tags at one-second rates runs comfortably on 4 cores and 8 GB of RAM. The historian is the component that grows: budget disk against your tag count, your logging rates and how long you keep history.

No endurance testing has been published

Raylux monitors its own memory, thread and handle trends and exposes them as [SYSTEM] tags, but a multi-day soak test with real device traffic has not been published. On a first deployment, watch Nexus's Performance page over the first week rather than assuming.

Network

Nexus needs:

• To reach your PLCs on their protocol ports.
• To be reachable by operators and engineers on 8080 (HTTP) and 8443 (HTTPS).

The Windows installer creates firewall rules for Nexus program on the Private and Domain profiles only — never Public. See Ports and firewall.

Which installer

The Windows download is two files. Use the first unless you have a reason not to.

File	Use it when
RayluxSetup-<version>-x64.exe	Normal installs. A wizard that installs the Microsoft C++ runtime Nexus needs, then Nexus itself.
Raylux-<version>-x64.msi	Deployment through Group Policy, SCCM, Intune or msiexec /qn. Does not install the C++ runtime — see below.

The MSI does not install the C++ runtime

Nexus requires the Microsoft Visual C++ 2015–2022 redistributable (x64). The RayluxSetup bundle installs it for you; the MSI cannot, because Windows Installer cannot install another MSI from inside one. On a machine that has never had it, an MSI-only install produces a service that fails to start with a missing-DLL error.

If you deploy the MSI, deploy VC_redist.x64.exe alongside it.

Next

• Install on Windows
• Install on Linux