Community
- Command Central
- MVP Program
- Monthly Mission
- Blogs
- Groups
- Events
- Media Vault
Products
- Observability
- Network Management
- Application Management
- IT Security
- IT Service Management
- System Management
- Database Management
Content Exchange
- SolarWinds Platform
- Server & Application Monitor
- Database Performance Analyzer
- Server Configuration Monitor
- Network Performance Monitor
- Network Configuration Manager
- SQL Sentry
- Web Help Desk
Free Tools & Trials
Store

solarwinds network performance monitor new implementation

hi,

i'm new in the forum and also new to the whole solarwinds world. i hope i'm posting in the right section otherwise please excuse me.

my company is using solarwinds network performance monitor for a couple of years now. we have 2700 devices in our network, so it's pretty huge.

i have now been assigned the task to buy new servers and install and implement all the stuff fresh. at in the end of the day there should be two servers for solarwinds (one hot and one cold), two polling enginees and one SQL server.

now i'm looking for suggestions to implement all the stuff and to optimate the performance.

i read a little bit about putting the SQL-DB into a SAN to get the most performance. at the moment our SQL-server is not in a SAN and it is really really slow. For example: it takes a lot of time to load all the network maps.

i hope you guys can help me a little bit. i would really appreciate it.

if you need more information, please ask further.

~jan

Find more posts tagged with

Accepted answers

ecklerwr1

If you don't have to virtualize then I wouldn't as you'll never run into VM issues if you're not using them. As far as the Symmetrix SAN goes... it all depends :P Sometimes dual HBA's going out to a symmetrix can be faster than local disk array... a lot depends on the age of the hardware (EMC and the server). An example if the choice is between dual HBA's to Symmetrix Array spread over disks vs. some older generation RAID controller in a server the choice might be easy. If your really concerned about it and have the time you could test it out:

Windows: IOmeter, iPeak, ATTO, HDtune - keep in mind that HDtune is not suitable for RAID arrays
Linux: bonnie, raidtest, rawio, iometer, blogbench, dd, iozone

Keep in mind that some benchmarks for Windows only test sequential performance which is not that important for most users.

All comments

ecklerwr1

In larger networks it definately helps to have the SQL server on a seperate server vs. having it on the same box as NPM and the webserver. It's also not recommended running the SQL server on a virtualized server although many people here have done it successfully.

TGhosh

1) make friends with your DBAs and Sys admins. Convince them to give you a dedicated SQL Server with TONS of RAM and Very fast disks (RAID 10 prefferrable)

2) Install NPM on a separate server (a VM is ok). Installation for NPM and any modules you have is relatively straight foward. SWs documentation and support are pretty good.

3) you've already found us here. let us know if you need help.

doublejay982

hey you guys...thanks for the replies.

our plan is the get a new SQL-server with a lot of RAM. like 16 GB or 32 GB. is that enough? and we also want to put raid10 arrays in this server. but here's a question: what about putting the SQL-DB into a SAN? i know that we have an EMC symmetrix down in the basement. will that give us more performance putting the DB there? perhaps we could place the solarwinds-server as well in the SAN and just use the console to connect to it. i think that must be possible. but i don't know if the performance of the DB and the solarwinds-server is faster after that?! espacially compared to our present implementation (solarwinds on a seperate server, one polling engine on a seperate server and a SQL-DB on a seperate server).

i like also the possibility to implement all the stuff on VMs, expect the SQL-DB. but i really need to convince our server-guy here. he's an old-fashion IT-guy who hates all the virtualized stuff. but keep your fingers crossed :

so long, ~jan

p.s.: i would really appreciate it when you guys tell me a little bit about your solarwinds network performance manager implementations.

ecklerwr1

doublejay982

All right guys, today i received the first offer for new servers and i'd like to share.

Orion-Server Polling-Engine:

SUN Fire X4170 x64 Server with 2 * 2,93 GHz Intel Xeon X5570 4-core-processor, 36 GB RAM DDR3 - 1333 MHz, 2 * 146 GB HDD, 1 * Storage Tech HBA 4GB

SQL-Server:

SUN Fire X4270 x64 Server with 2 * 2,93 GHz Intel Xeon X5570 4-core-processor, 36 GB RAM DDR3 - 1333 MHz, 2 * 146 HDD + 2 * 300 GB, 1 * Storage Tech HBA 4GB

What do you say?

ecklerwr1

Sounds like 2 really strong boxes to me... here's link to other users real world data if that helps:

Also depending on how many nodes you have if it's a lot per poller maybe some of the people polling a lot of nodes can chime in :}

Congo

The Sun DB server you have sounds just right. However the polling box is overkill. I would make that an ESX machine and run a few instances of pollers on it.

ecklerwr1

Yup that'd be one heck of poller... :}

doublejay982

the idea with the ESX and different VMs sounds great to me. i hope i can convince my co-worker with that idea.

but at the moment i'm not really sure what the purpose of the polling engine is. is it just a server whose job it is to get all the information from the network devices? what does this server need most? RAM? CPU? And how many of them would you suggest to implement? We have appr. 2700 cisco network switches and routers which should be monitored.