Hey everyone,
I've been tasked to build a new Solarwinds monitoring environment at a large organisation.
Currently we have installed :
SolarWindsOrion Platform 2017.1,
NPM 12.1,
CloudMonitoring 1.0.0,
SAM 6.4.0,
DPAIM 11.0.0,
VIM 7.1.0,
NetPath 1.1.0,
QoE 2.3,
UDT 3.2.4,
IPAM 4.3.2,
NCM 7.5.1,
NTA 3.11.0
| ELEMENTS | 4794 |
| NETWORK NODE ELEMENTS | 1125 |
| VOLUME ELEMENTS | 1576 |
| INTERFACE ELEMENTS | 2093 |
We are going to upgrade the main poller and the sql server.
Currently the main poller has 32 GB Ram and 12 Cores.
The database server is a shared SQL server with 64GB Ram and 16 Cores.
I want to give them a few options before we move to new infrastructure.
Option 1. Full Physical. - Larger environments.
Main Poller on own physical hardware with all modules installed.
Dedicated SQL Server on own physical server with Solarwinds Orion database running.
Solarwinds recommend 2 x 146GB RAID 1 mirrored drives for Solarwinds polling server and 1 separate drive for the O/S.
Solarwinds recommend SQL server database has own physical drive.
Advantages : Dedicated NIC. Heavy polling use does not affect other VM's as poller has own dedicated NIC. SQL database has access to fast I/O on dedicated disk RAID array.
Disadvantages : server would have to be engineered with redundancy (RAID and failover) whereas VM would already have DRS and host redundancy.
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Option 2. Full Virtual Poller & Virtual shared SQL database.
Virtualised main poller.
Virtualised SQL server running multiple other databases as well as Solarwinds.
Advantages : Can assign CPU and Memory dynamically as required. Utilises DRS and host redundancy of VMWare infrastructure.
Disadvantages :Solarwinds recommend SQL server database has own physical drive if SQL installed virtually.
Due to large I/O access to poller from all other network servers and devices NIC on virtual host may slow down and prevent other VM's from working properly.
I/O to SQL database disk may slow down as a result of being virtualised.
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Option 3. Virtualised Poller + Hardware SQL database. May require dedicated host if environment grows very large.
Virtualised main poller.
Dedicated SQL Server on own physical server with Solarwinds Orion database running.
Advantages : Poller has VMWare redundancy. SQL database has access to fast I/O on dedicated disk RAID array.
Disadvantages : Due to large I/O access to poller from all other network servers and devices NIC on virtual host may slow down and prevent other VM's from working properly on same host. Constant assessment of impact of poller and SQL database upon environment (other VM's) would need to be carried out to make sure environment performance does not degrade.
I appreciate that Solarwinds recommend the pollers and the SQL database both being physical and I have before experienced one main poller on a busy host that caused slowdowns for other VM's over a shared NIC but I thought I would see what you think about this on Thwack and hopefully come out with the best solution for my customer?
All input appreciated.
