# Hardware for Engine Cluster nodes

You can run different nodes of the same cluster on different types of hardware.

The hardware the cluster nodes run on does not need to be identical. Different types of equipment can be used as long as all nodes have enough network interfaces for your configuration. Engine Clusters can run on a Security Engine appliance, on a standard server with an Intel-compatible processor, or as a virtual machine on a virtualization platform.

If equipment with different performance characteristics is clustered together, the load-balancing technology automatically distributes the load so that lower performance nodes handle less traffic than the higher performance nodes. However, when a node goes offline, the remaining nodes must be able to handle all traffic on their own to ensure high availability. For this reason, it is usually best to cluster nodes with similar performance characteristics.