There are several ways to limit the resources used by the scanning engine.
-
You can broadly limit the number concurrently scanned hosts in the
/etc/openvas/openvas.confconfiguration file. See here for options to limit using that method. -
You can also override those limits by setting the number of scanned hosts and NVTs per host in each scan task configuration. See screenshot below.
-
You can use schedules and set a DURATION for each scan to ensure that scans are only running one at a time. However, this will pause scans that do not finish within the limited time. See the duration decription within Schedule section .
-
Finally, you can create an alert and apply it to a specific scan task that will trigger another scan task once the first is complete. This will allow chaining scan tasks in a specific order.