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Upgrading Orion 7.4 SLX To 8.5.1 SP3

Hi,

I am looking at upgrading our aging Orion 7.4 installation to the latest 8.5.1 SP3.

Our Orion 7.4 is on a server housing the SQL server as well, running a 2.8GHz P4 HT with 2GB RAM, and plenty of disk space.

My questions are:

(1) What major benefits will I gain from upgrading to 8.5.1?

(2) Will I need any increase in server hardware to accomodate the upgrade?

Many thanks.

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mark_wiggans

(1) What major benefits will I gain from upgrading to 8.5.1?
(2) Will I need any increase in server hardware to accomodate the upgrade?

The main benefit to you would be getting on a supported version of Orion. Many new features and modules have been added for which you can see from this technical demonstration -

Technical Demonstrationof ORION:

http://www.solarwinds.com/resources/democenter/RyanOrionCirrusToolset/RyanOrionCirrusToolset.html

however keep in mind that you will first need to upgrade to 7.8.5 before going to 8.5.1 (SP3 which is now bundled with the installer)

When upgrading from versions prior to 7.8.5, you must first upgrade to 7.8.5 before you can upgrade to the current version. Contact SolarWinds Support to obtain Orion version 7.8.5.
When upgrading from version 8.0.2 or earlier, database changes required to improve performance cause the database update to take longer than in previous upgrades. For example, a database of 10GB can take over an hour to upgrade

Requirements:

Operating System	Windows 2003 Server (32-bit or 64-bit) including R2, with IIS installed
.NET Framework	Version 3.0 or later
SQL Server	The following SQL Server version are supported: SQL Server 2000 SP4 Standard, or Enterprise SQL Server 2005 Express, Standard, or Enterprise
Web Console Browser	The following browsers are supported: Microsoft Internet Explorer version 6 or later Firefox 2.0 or later

FormerMember

You can see a detailed list of changes by looking at the release notes for 8.5.1: www.solarwinds.com/.../releaseNotes.htm

doughtysm

Hi,

Thanks for the replies.

The link you provided above only appears to deal with the changes from the previous version (v8.0?) to 8.5.1.

I am having trouble finding a compelling reason to upgrade as yet.

Is no-one from SolarWinds going to try and sell it to me? lol.

chris.conway

Several things were added, but some of the main ones are:

Custom MIB Polling - poll any OID you like
Advanced Alerting - More control over alerts, sustained conditions, delayed action, acknowledgments
Support for NetFlow module
Support for VoIP module
SQL 2005 support
SNMP Trap Receiver added
Think Syslog server came after 7.4 as well