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Installing Solarwinds On-Premise...can these servers be on VMs or do they have to be physical HW?

rbirealty

Probably asked before or is in a document somewhere but I haven't seen it yet.

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jvb

Yes, they can be VMs as long as you follow the recommended specs in the admin guides for the modules you are installing.

http://www.solarwinds.com/documentation/apm/docs/SAMAdminGuide.pdf

leigham_martin

I am currently running SAM 6.4 on VM along with WPM. I haven't setup my WPM transactions yet but i will probably offload these to another box with an agent on thats less busy.

I also have SQL installed on the same VM (32GB Ram, 6 Cores, Drives are on our top tier storage on the SAN, SSDs, SAS etc.) and im having some issues with DB performance at the moment with regards to Page Writes/sec, baring in mind SolarWinds do say to have these separate (which i think i will end up doing - splitting the App/DB) but even with all that my VM is very busy.

Especially when it starts polling!

But the benefit of being virtual beats having to pay costs for a physical servers, licensing for SQL server which is now getting ridiculous and snapshots of course.

Speaking generally, yes, you can install on VMs - id run a POC/Trial or something first so that you can see if it meets your expectations in your environment.

HerrDoktor

With respect to SQL Licensing, don't you have to license the whole virtual infrastructure for SQL when not using HyperV as Hypervisor?

I usually recommend a physical SQL-Box for my clients if they don't already own MSSQL licenses.

Cheers

mprobus

Yes, for SQL you have to license the entire cluster. We have a dedicated SQL farm where we license the respective hosts. I understand that most organizations do not have that luxury.

leigham_martin

We are using VMware and licensing our VM SQL Servers with core based licensing. I dont believe you have to license the underlying ESXI hosts.

Plus if we did, we are running x4 Socket 10 core CPU's (40 Cores, 80 Threads per node) in our VMware cluster so it would get very very expensive!

HerrDoktor

Please double check with your Microsoft provider. I am very positive (not 100% sure) but I guess when you are running vmware AND vmotion for everything you need to license the WHOLE underlying hardware!

It is a different Story with HyperV.

The reason the license cost would be astronomically high brings the customers to the conclusion to have dedicated SQL boxes again.

Cheers!

--- EDIT: added vmotion section