Solarwinds LEM redundancy

Hi-I have a bit of a unique requirement in that we'd like to deliver a fully redundant system, and that includes deploying LEM, if possible. Is it possible to have 2 separate appliances aggregating data from the same client machines? I don't see anyway to connect a single client to more than one manager, or any way to run two appliances in any kind of primary/standby configuration. Is this accurate? Can anyone come up with an alternative solution?

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Accepted answers

whpd

Not sure if this is exactly what you are looking for, but for syslog type forwarding, you could just set multiple targets on the senders. You'd have to set up the same installed/agented clients and connectors as well. Not a perfect solution, but might fulfill your requirements. Might be possible to forward all logs from one node to another, this would allow for some redundancy, but in this situation, you wouldn't be receiving logs on the secondary if the primary died, only have a backup of its logs.

Another option that might actually work much better for you is to use VMware's Fault Tolerance to have a failover device. You should be able to find info on this on the internet, though I can help if you need. It would basically give you a clone of the virtual appliance that could kick in if the primary died. LEM itself would be unaware of the setup, but in theory it should work as you intend.

All comments

whpd

cobryson

Thanks for the ideas. It's a weird situation, but the ideal config is having the secondary receive logs as well.

I've considered HA/FT via VMware, and that may be the best route to go...just requires more $$ in licensing, a vCenter machine, etc.

Thanks!

whpd

VMware licensing certainly would need to be considered before going the FT route. The more cumbersome/time consuming route (that I could think of at least) would be to configure everything twice (pushed syslogs going to both appliances and those with installed agents configured on both LEM appliances). Though I'd imagine the LEM licenses would be significantly less than the VMware licenses (assuming you don't already have the appropriate licenses already), in the VM FT route, you would only need a single LEM appliance license (I think), since there really would only be one LEM appliance. The other way would require two active LEM appliances. Just food for thought.

cobryson

Well, so that’s my question, I suppose-how would I go about configuring two separate appliances to work with the same installed agents? When installing the (Windows, in my case) agents, it asks for a single manager name/IP, and you can’t install multiple instances of the agent…what am I missing?

whpd

Hey, I just so happened to be looking for something else on my LEM appliance and noticed something you might be interested in. I was connected via SSH and in the "appliance" menu I see the following (see screenshot):

There are two options that you might find interesting... promote and demote. Both of which refer to a failover set, which is what you might be looking for. I'd say that is worth looking into. Note you don't actually have to connect via SSH, you should be able to get to the same screen by just using the console.

FormerMember

These are pretty old functions, I think they've been deprecated. They required some manual setup effort, too. As far as I know, you need to either use VMware HA or snapshots and manual "failover."

cobryson

Thanks everyone for their advice-it does appear that using a VM-based High Availability or Fault Tolerant configuration is the way to go. We're configuring a test FT environment now to evaluate...thanks again!