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Orion on ESX Server

Hi,

Does anyone have any experience on running Orion on vmware's ESX server?
What is the performance like?
Any Do's and Dont's?

I have had a search in the forum but it hasn't been discussed in much detail before.

Cheers,
Chris

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Accepted answers

All comments

alfordc

Has anyone got any experience with Orion and ESX server?

I guess not!

Can anyone give advice on whether it is better to run Orion (monitoring 800 elements) on its own server or has anyone got it running with other applications? If so what are they?

Network_Guru

I can't see Orion running well in a VMware environment.
It is very Memory & CPU intensive when running reports &/or with many users logged in, depending on how many elements are displayed on your home page.

See the minimum server requirements:
www2.solarwinds.net/.../SystemReq.htm

Perhaps if you had the DB running on a dedicated SQL server it might be OK with 800 nodes.
It also depends on interfaces monitored as well as statistics polling intervals you have set.

-=Cheers=-
NG

vhcato

We're running it on VM, and it's working quite well for us. Here's a little info about our Orion environment.

Orion host server - Acts as web host, syslog server, tftp server, and alert engine (beta), as well as a centralized server for performing all configuration tasks for the entire Orion installation.

One additional polling engine - Monitoring approx 4,500 elements in our two data centers. We will be adding another 1,500 to 2,000 elements to this one before the end of the year.

Two additional polling engines - Currently monitoring approx 1,500 elements each. The number of elements on these guys will increase to approx 7,500 each in the very near future. These also have the Wireless Management Packs installed.

Naturally, the database is running on a separate SQL server (non-VM), and our polling and statistics collection intervals are somewhat frequent at 5 minutes.

Each of the Orion servers is currently allocated 1GB of RAM, and one CPU each. Don't hold me to the server hardware specs, cuz I'm not a server guy, but I believe the ESX hosts in the 5 server group of boxes supporting Orion (& a few other apps like CiscoWorks and ACS) are each 4-way Opteron based systems.

Like I said, the Orion servers work pretty well for us on ESX. The biggest problem we have is periodic performance issues with the database server (which is shared). I'll have to whoop out my stick and go after our SQL folks pretty soon.

Hope this helps...

raven

Hi Alfordc
I had Orion running on a ESX Server and I cant say it performed at all. We had all resources possible added to that instance but it was slow like hell, the CPU usage was mostly over 50%, sometimes even 100% for a longer period of time and we just have ~150 Devices.

Now we just use a IBM Desktop with 4 GB RAM and I think 3GHz CPU and it performs great.

Running Orion on a ESX is IMHO a big no no.

Best regards,

Michel

jkeberle

We do it here.. Both the Orion server and the SQL data base are running on ESX.

NOTE: we are starting to see perfomance issues as we just pasted the 3000 instances mark and climbing so we are getting ready to move off of VMWare, however this is the #1 issue to NOT do.

Ensure that the SQL server's database is on its own dedicated LUN (if your using a SAN) on an NTFS filesystem and not VMFS.

Other than that, it works relatively well especially when you factor in Vmotion abilities.

Mauro

Hi,
We're running it on VM, and it's working fine.

We have one VM that are running Orion host server - Acts as web host, syslog server, tftp server, and alert engine, as well as a centralized server for performing all configuration tasks for the entire Orion installation, and polling engine - Monitoring approx 250 elements in our network.

Our database is running on a separate SQL server (non-VM), and our polling and statistics collection intervals are default.

The VM to Orion server is currently allocated 2GB of RAM, and two CPU.

We have two ESX Servers that are running in a Dell PE6850 running 14 VMs, each servers have 16 GB RAM - 04 CPUs 3.3 GHz cache L3 08Mb.

Best regards,

Mauro