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Server upgrade for SQL / Orion

We are getting ready to re-configure the hardware with runs Orion and SQL. Currently, I have Orion with polling engine running on a 2-processor 3.6GHz server with 4 gigs of ram. SQL is running on a different server with similar hardware - but has (2) 3.0 GHz processors. Both servers have 4 gigs of memory.

I have a quad core 3 GHz blade server with 10 gigs of memory that I plan on using to replace the SQL server. Would there be any advantage of moving Orion to the same physical box at this point - or should I keep them separate?

It seems that the bottleneck is more SQL than anything at this point (due to not enough memory). We are monitoring 157 nodes and 1480 interfaces. There doesn't seem to be a processor issue on the polling engine.

Thanks for any information on this.

Mark Hofmann

Sr. Network Engineer - Lifebridge Health

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justsomeguy1988

Mark,

Except in small Orion environments I would not recommend running the polling engine and SQL server on the same box. Too much fighting for resources. Spend time configuring the SQL server for fast I/O. This is especially important if you are collecting NetFlow data. Also split your SQL logs out to a seperate physical volume. Don't forget to tune your polling engine with the Polls per second tuning tool (Start>SolarWinds Orion>Advanced Features).

Network_Guru

Also SQL performance is much improved if you can run the whole DB in Memory.
I'm running mine with 8 Gb of RAM on an AMD x64 box, but have just ordered an additional 6 Gb as the memory utilization is currently at 90% and I have not yet setup very much syslogging to my Orion server.

Also Netflow is extremely DB intensive. We are using a separate Netflow product on a dedicated server with Raid 0 Disk array.

MarkHofmann

Stephen,

I experimented with the polls per second tuning wizard, and have set my polling engine values to the max for both the values with no ill effects. The polling engine/webserver/Orion server never goes above 30-40% CPU. When using the suggested settings, it seemed to get "backed up" on polling. It doesn't seem to hurt anything having the settings maxed and keeps the queue from getting backed up.

Are there any tuning options suggested for SQL Server 2005? That is what I am using, and will be moving the databases from the older server to the new blade server in the near future. Our netperfmon.db is 37 gig, and we also have a Cirrus Configuration Manager database that is 3 gig. Running all that on our current (2) processor 3GHz server with (4) gigs of memory is overworking the drives, and causing some slowness. Nothing horrible, but it used to be much faster when we had less nodes.

I think going to this new server with 10 gigs of memory and quad-core processor will greatly improve the SQL side of things. If there are certainly things I can do to SQL for fast I/O, please let me know. Thanks!

Mark Hofmann

Sr. Network Engineer - Lifebridge Health