Orion Architecture

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This blog was posted in 2011 and is no longer accurate. For the latest information, check out the following resources:

SolarWinds Orion Platform Scalability Guide

Orion Platform Architecture and Deployment Options Video

This blog recaps in relatively simple terms and diagrams, the basics of Orion’s architecture.

It is obviously not exhaustive in terms of the products and the deployment combinations, but it will hopefully give you the basic rules so you can easily derive and adapt them to your particular Orion deployment.

This blog is designed to help you getting rapidly familiar with most of the concepts and terminology but does not replace the architectural considerations described in each product’s user documentation set.

It is also a good set of pointers to many excellent blog postings that have been written in the past on all these products and components. Just follow the links…

The “*” in front of the names in the diagrams below, denotes commercial products. Boxes without “*” are modules that come with the Orion infrastructure and cannot be bought (e.g. Core).

I hope you’ll enjoy it and like always, post your comments and questions here, we’ll try to respond to them and improve this blog.

Basic software architecture

Previous blog posts of interest: Orion NPM vNext Sign Up for Beta 3 & tell us what you think of improved Juniper support and many other features and improvements, Does your Service Provider deliver?, Data Aggregation and Summarization for NetFlow (NTA), NPM & APM Level 1 Customer Training
Orion Core’s ability to handle dependencies and groups of managed elements in general and dynamic service groups in particular

Scalability: Growing an instance of Orion

With the Additional Web server (more users)
And the Additional Polling Engine (larger/more networks)

Scalability: Consolidating multiple instances of Orion

EOC can be used for scalability or organizational needs (e.g. regional and national responsibilities; visualization offered at both levels)

Segmented deployments

Avoiding VPN accesses with the Additional Web Server

Standalone products: APM, UDT, IPAM, NCM, SEUM

With EOC providing a single pane of glass view
NCM 7.0, 7.1, and 7.2 Architecture and Deployment
Standalone vs. Module – What’s the difference and should I care?

Standalone products (shared DB server)

It is possible to host several SQL Server databases on the same physical database server
We do not support two instances of Orion products sharing the same database, but multiple Orion database can share the same SQL Server host if it is appropriately sized
We recommend to run the DB Server on a physical server (not a VM)

Highly Available Architecture: Orion Fail Over Engine (Understanding the Orion Failover Engine Architecture) delivers several levels of protection

Server and Application (shown below). Also Network, Performance, Data. See FOE’s User’s Documentation on this page
FoE can protect the following components: Core, APM, EOC, IPAM, IP SLAM, NCM, NPM, NTA. NTA 4.x and FoE is addressed specifically here
More on FoE: Orion Failover Engine Deployment Options and Q&A
Upcoming Webcast - Creating High Availability and Fault Tolerant Environments using SolarWinds Failover Engine

MSP-type deployment

Today, there are two recommended ways to deal with MSP-type deployments of Orion, where an MSP manages Customer networks that have potentially overlapping IP Addresses

NAT-based deployment: Network Address Translators translate the customer domain addresses, so that they are all unique from an Orion perspective

EOC-based deployment: a full instance of Orion is deployed per Customer and they are consolidated at the MSP level by EOC

NAT-based deployment

NAT eliminates overlapping IP addresses

Makes identifications of managed devices more complex because the translated IP’s don’t make sense to report readers. This can be addressed by populating custom properties with IP’s or Names that will not be affected by any translation.

EOC-based deployment

More on MSP deployment in general and multi-tenancy in particular here

Find more posts tagged with

IP Address Manager (IPAM)

seum_productblog

Network Configuration Manager (NCM)

udt_productblog

NetFlow Traffic Analyzer (NTA)

ipsla_productblog

Server & Application Monitor (SAM)

Network Performance Monitor (NPM)

SolarWinds Orion Platform

Comments

Radioman

Unfortunately, using the EOC while helpful to an administrator, how do you get separate databases to appear as one?

Right now I have a PRIMARY NPM server and 11 Polling Engines, with a standalone Database.

The true NON scalability is from the limited number of elements that can be monitored by a single polling engine, it has improved from the previous 9,000 to 12,000 elements, but with the advent of large numbers of interfaces on devices/nodes some with 4,000 interfaces, you can't get very many onto a poller. I'm forced to track elements, instead of managing the system.

FormerMember

Very good post.

How would one suggest that SAM is deployed accross an environment where data centres are geographically seperated? My primary data center is hosted in the UK with smaller sites in the US and Australia. The US and Australia sites only have up to 100 nodes (max) therefore this may not warrant a full scale EOC deployment.. Is a seperate poller in each location the only way to go in this regard?

Apreciate any suggestions?

Thanks, Dale

aLTeReGo

SAM 5.2 and earlier do not support remote poller deployments. Additional pollers are fully supported but they should be located on the same LAN as the SQL database server. E.G. low latency. SAM 5.5, currently in beta does support remote additional pollers which can be geographically dispersed to remote locations away from the SQL database server. With SAM 5.2 I would recommend a SAM instance for both your US and Australia locations rolled up to an EOC. However, if you have decent connectivity with relatively low latency to these locations from your UK office via a lease line or VPN, you may be successful polling these servers remotely from a centralized location.

FormerMember

Many thanks for the response.

Radioman

I was told the the new release of NPM 10.4 would allow for 3 polling engine clusters presenting a single IP to the network.

Is this the case? If so a diagram of how this looks would be helpful.

Thanks

Radioman

scvvuuren

Nice Blog

It does explain alot.

Is there a document like this in a PDF format somewhere on the website.

Is there perhaps an updated version of this?

fcaron

Thanks.

No PDF documents.

We'll look on an update. It's still mostly accurate, but a few points need updating

FormerMember

I see no mention of the GUI re write based in the request HTML5 engine

the current GUI is very out of date and many users are complaining about items like auto refresh

imagine if google maps was not based on HTML5

when will SW update orion core engine

peterson10015

Great idea..

haripala

Good one

uidzer0

Solarwinds people,

Looking over these diagrams and something is sticking out at me. You have a heavy reliance on scaling CoreDB sql services UP and not out. Are their any expectations that you'll start to use a myriad of specialized services to accommodate to the scale of your customers? Ex, Memcached, NoSql, application routing.

Additionally, more web services don't fix many problems. You need to allow web gardens for application pool distribution. Too many times i find the entire system under lock because of a long running process in the application pool.

jeremyxmentzell

OH man. +10 to this idea. I'm in this right now trying to map our architecture for the next 4-6 years.

theuns.jonck

Hi @fcaron

I've logged a call for something related to this with the SolarWinds team.

Do you know what is the difference in traffic when:

you use traffic from the polling engine across the WAN vs polling traffic across the WAN.
When would you recommend a HA DB cluster

FormerMember

when will SW update orion core engine t o be based on HTML5

andrew_watson

Just a question, what's solarwinds advice on using load balancers like eg Citrix netscaler? Can you do it with a core and web server or would you have to have two web servers as a front end with the core in the backend

aLTeReGo

Network Load Balancers are commonly used with a pool of Additional Web Servers.They cannot really be used with the main Orion poller since only one main Orion polled can be active at any given time. For high availability Orion instances you would need to utilize something like the Failover Engine.You could however load balance the web traffic going to the primary Orion instance and an Additional Web Server using a Network Load Balancer like an F5, NetScaler, or even using Cisco's Server Load Balancing feature.

theuns.jonck

I have 2 web servers working quite effectively.

The named space is then advertised and always available.

theuns.jonck

What is your element count per polling engine?

Are your polling engines all remotely located?

What is the traffic throughput from the polling engine to the DB?

FormerMember

very good post ........

capta

Thanks for this post! Very good breakdown.

izwan

thanks fcaron..its good

rschroeder

Nicely done. Thank you.

nick_scott

This post is from 2011, surely some of these practices have changed...

mjfergie

Great!

Vinx

could we have a up to date version ?

GoldTipu

Adding Referenced post when accessing Orion from WAN

Secured WAN access with additional web server in DMZ

CourtesyIT

Good topic. Keep it coming.

tallyrich

Very nice over view of Orion platform.

rcbarr

We are running an Active/Active implementation across two distinct data centers. Each data center has 8 Pollers and a dedicated database server. Our challenge is their is no way we would ever convince our admins to make changes in two environments. So we need a way to synchronize the databases if a DR situation occurs (Sync Primary to DR database). Prior to version NPM 12.0 we had a solid solution, however with NPM 12 and the move to store the licensing into the database effectively broke our current solution. I can provide a lot more detail, but what are you guys thoughts?

aLTeReGo

As stated in the NPM 'What we're working on' post, we are actively working to develop a new disaster recovery solution for Orion. In the interim, there have been several customers who have been successful utilizing HA in a multi-subnet configuration.

SolarWinds High Availability - HA - In a WAN Environment!!!

High Availability and Disaster Recovery Solution with Full Servers and Site Protection - RFC/Design Stage