Poller Stacking

tmcurry

Is anyone currently stacking pollers?

If so can you describe your stack and story:

modules,

element

hardware specs such as Vm or server with basic specs cores, memory etc.

Basic experience, do you like it regret it and so forth.  We are considering doing this for some not all pollers in our environment, where we think it makes sense.

Any other input performance wise, upgrade experience, success and failure stories.

Thank you 

mugbukdotcom3

In our environment we have 12 APE licenses. We used to have them stacked 2 licenses to one server. (i.e. 6 polling servers, each with 2 licenses). I strongly discourage stacking licenses. We had countless recurring issues that immediately stopped once we 'un-stacked' our polling engines. The most prominent and impactful issue was that polling simply did not work. Some nodes had gaps in the polled data that could be up to hours long. Every time that we got on the phone with solarwinds technical support they said that one of two things about our polling issues:

1) stacking polling engines is not recommended and you should un-stack if you want polling to work properly,

2) polling issues are due to 'port exhaustion' and you must change some registry settings and unmanage down devices to alleviate this (we always followed their recommendations but it never solved the issue).

Our servers were virtual machines running Windows Server 2008 R2, had 12 CPU cores and 32 GB of RAM. They were monitoring roughly 16,000-18,000 elements each (which amazes me considering with 2 licenses you can monitor up to 24,000 elements).

In short, avoid stacking if you can.