Orion ESX Installation Requirement Clarification

On page 9 (PDF page 25) of the Orion NPM Admin Guide there are a number of charts and sentences about NPM installations on Virtual Machines.

"Each installation of Orion NPM should have its own, dedicated network interface card.
Note: Since Orion NPM uses SNMP to monitor your network, if you are unable to dedicate a network interface card to your Orion NPM installation, you may experience gaps in monitoring data due to the low priority generally assigned to SNMP traffic."

Does "Orion NPM" mean the entire package or NPM and SQL or or just the Orion NPM part. This is confusing as the previous sentence says:

"Note: SolarWinds strongly recommends that you maintain your SQL Server database on a separate physical server"

Ill explain why I need the clarification. Currently we have a VM server set up to host the Orion NPM software and the web server. We have a physical server to host the SQL database. In this scenario is it necessary to have a dedicated NIC for Orion NPM or is this only necessary if SQL is running on a VM server?

Also does the Orion NPM application HD need to be raid 1+0 or just the SQL? Again this sentence in the Admin guide is confusing depending on how its read, since intense read/write will be to the SQL Database not the Orion App or Web server.

Note: RAID 1+0 is recommended; due to intense I/O requirements RAID 5 is not recommended

Thanks in advance.

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aLTeReGo

Does "Orion NPM" mean the entire package or NPM and SQL or or just the Orion NPM part. This is confusing as the previous sentence says:

This means just NPM.

is it necessary to have a dedicated NIC for Orion NPM or is this only necessary if SQL is running on a VM server

If running NPM under VMWare, you should dedicate a network interface card to the guest OS that is running NPM.

does the Orion NPM application HD need to be raid 1+0 or just the SQL?

Only the SQL Server should be 1+0. Raid 5 is just fine for the the Orion NPM Application server

JasonKV

I have a few more questions after speaking with the VM systems guy.

Dedicated NIC describes what?

My understanding of VM is that the physical NIC (hardware) are configured to connect to virtual switches on the VM. Those virtual switches then are configured to go to certain virtual machines via VLAN Tagging. As far as the OS running on the virtual machine (windows in this case) it has no knowledge of shared resources within the OS, the NIC looks like any normal dedicated NIC to him. If the VM machine does not care what type of traffic (SNMP) and the host OS does not know that physical resource is being shared, How will either be able to discriminate to SNMP?

After thinking about this is dedicated NIC referring to dedicated Virtual NIC or dedicated Physical NIC? Our systems guy had mentioned something about pooling resources and hard setting "shares" to divide workload, Is this what you are trying to avoid?

Sorry for the convoluted post, its tough to describe this situation clearly. Any further clarification would be appreciated.

asanchez

Hi, good morning, I'm going to migrate my Orion NPM and web server to ESX and I want to migrate the physical database server to a virtual esx. In the Administration guide SolarWinds recomends to mantain the sql server on a physical, do you know why?? Is there some problems if both (orion and sql) are in diferents servers??

aLTeReGo

In the Administration guide SolarWinds recomends to mantain the sql server on a physical, do you know why?? Is there some problems if both (orion and sql) are in diferents servers??

Quite the contrary. Whenever possible you should separate the functions of the SQL database server, from the Orion application server. I believe what Solarwinds is recommending is to keep your MSSQL server on physical hardware and not to virtualize the DB, since that would have a negative impact performance on performance.

JasonKV

Bump on my Previous Questions?

What does 'dedicated NIC' mean? See above for my confusion.

k3ithtaylor

I don't think anyone will refute that dedicated NIC means dedicated physical NIC. The solarwinds folks are telling you that their produces high network traffic. You might want to avoid sharing the resources with other VMs. A dedicated physical NIC is not a requirement but instead best practice. If you want to manage the NIC resources via shares it'll still work, just be prepared to monitor the NIC performance and its impact on every VM it supports.

You can't much argue with this disclaimer:

Note: Since Orion NPM uses SNMP to monitor your network, if you are unable to dedicate a network interface card to your Orion NPM installation, you may experience gaps in monitoring data due to the low priority generally assigned to SNMP traffic."

FormerMember

Not quite. It is not the case that Orion products a high volume of traffic. The point is that we rely heavily on SNMP, which is a very low-priority protocol. Sometimes, on ESX boxes, the other traffic on a shared NIC will swamp the SNMP traffic, so it gets swamped. Hence the suggestion that you get a dedicated NIC for Orion's VM.