Solarwinds multiple products at same machine or server

baqir

Hi every one

I have to install different solarwinds products like NPM, NTA, VNQM, WHD and NTM. It will be my first experience with these products or you can say with solarwinds.

I want to deploy it on a medium size network , so the question is do i need a separate Physical or virtual servers for everyone or we can install all that on a same server or same machine and also add with them web server.

I saw their hardware requirements separately but confuse in this mater. How much i can make them combine so i can avoid more servers  and operating system licences.

Please explain and give me the right and low cost solution.

thanks 

rschroeder

Help us help you, by providing some more details to us about your environment:

• You said you have a "medium sized network." 
  • How many nodes will you monitor?
  • How many elements will you monitor?
  • What things (if any) are you NOT going to monitor?
  • Are there any overlapping or duplicate IP address spaces that need monitoring?
  • What kinds of distances are involved between your furthest nodes?
  • Do you have NOCs in different time zones?  If so, how many time zones?  Will they all rely on the same NPM server?
  • How important will monitoring and reporting become to your organization? If there's a chance you'll need a Highly Available solution built, SW Support can help you size & design & implement it, but it's not going to work on just one server.
• We understand that you want to save money by having the fewest number of physical or virtual servers.  What are your limitations beyond that?

Depending on the items you answered above, you might be able to get by with NTM, NPM, NTA all on the same server.  But if your node count or element count is high (more than 12,000 elements monitored), you'll need a second polling license.  In fact, plan on a dedicated polling license for each 12,000 - 15,000 elements monitored.

Depending on how many resources you can dedicate to your Solarwinds needs, you may find you can stack multiple licenses on the same server, thus reducing your monitoring/polling server count.  On the other hand, you might also find that you may benefit from having licenses installed on several different servers, particularly if you can't get enough resources allocated on a given VM instance.

I recommend you collect this information and share it with Solarwinds Technical Support; ask them to work with you and map out a best plan for your particular needs.

I started with monitoring 6,000 elements and I put NCM, NPM, NTA, and NTM all on the same physical server.  This worked just fine.  As my organization grew and merged with other similar organizations, I ended up having a best plan of putting two pollers in my first location, and one poller each in two other locations that are 150 and 300 miles away from the first location.  I have a total of about 40,000 monitored elements on those four pollers, and they all complete their polling cycles 100% of the time. 

You'll know you've got some tweaking or growing to do if one or more of your pollers doesn't not consistently experience 100% completion for every polling cycle due to.  This may be due to having either too many monitored elements (more than 13,000 elements per poller means you should start thinking about adding another poller to distribute the work), or to having adjusted the polling for too many devices to be too frequent.  By default, NPM will poll every 120 seconds, and the "unlimited" license can complete the polling of 12,000-15,000 elements within that time frame just fine.  But if you've adjusted your default polling rate to every 60 or 30 or 10 seconds, there's no way NPM can get that job done, despite your desire to have better granularity in your graphs and reports.  It's a balancing act, and if you're on the edge of needing another poller, you might "get by" by changing your polling frequency to something higher than 120 seconds.

On the other hand, this if your organization and your job--do you really want to just barely "get by" by providing insufficient resources to a great tool like Solarwinds? 

Sometimes you'll find it's less expensive in the long run to add more servers and licenses and achieve the optimal polling rate and reporting capability than it is to save money on VM hosts or physical servers and licenses. 

Solarwinds technical support & Sales should be able to guide you correctly.  They did well by me, and the only adjustments I've made in my Solarwinds environment in 12 years are:

• I added the Enterprise Operations Console when I joined three regional organizations' Orion systems together, and then observed it didn't serve my need to unify those regions into one organization.  Therefore I removed EOC and recouped its licenses and support fees by sending four poller servers' data into one NPM server.  This helps all players treat the organization as one big family, where they previously put up team walls based on physical location.  Removing EOC removed those walls, and also improved the reporting / monitoring speed and capability of the systems.
• Everything was originally on dedicated physical servers, which worked OK for 2005.  Later, we moved it all to VM and that ended up with some serious degradation of performance due to our trying to save money by not buying big enough VM hosts, and by our SysAdmins not having sufficient experience with allocating memory and CPU resources.  Eventually that was ironed out and our VM environment provides the same performance that dedicated physical servers handled previously.  Just make sure you use the recommended guidelines from Solarwinds when planning on servers, VM hosts, and resources.  Don't set up for their minimum specifications--use what they tell you will cause your programs to work at their optimum best.  If you have a VM environment, it sure saves on physical space, cooling, network connections, resilience, and it makes for some great snap shot capabilities for backups and restores when it's time to upgrade your SW products.

You also mentioned VNQM and WHD.  NPM need sSQL running in the back end, and your DBA's should work with Solarwinds to ensure the right resources are provisioned to get your database up and running with the right sized space.  Plan to allow for the growth you'll need to be able to provide historic reports as far back as you want to pay for with disc space.  I do not use VNQM and WHD yet, but I know the competing products we use instead of them require a dedicated separate appliance for the VNQM-like product, and our LANDesk Service Desk takes up huge amounts of disc space, CPU, and RAM.  I suspect WHD may require separate server and DB space if your organization's size is not small.

Answer my question up at top, get SW Support to advise you, then come back here and share with us what you learned from them.  Maybe we'll see something new and interesting that will save us servers or licenses, and you'll be the hero of the hour!