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

Running Polling Engines as VM's in VMWare...Problems?

Both my Primary Orion NPM system and my Additional Polling Engine are running as VM's in VMWare. For the most part they seem to function well.

One of the problems I have encountered seems to be related to running Snapshots, this seems to cause very brief interruptions for the system making it unable to access it's database resulting in an automated restart of some of the Orion services.

I am curious if anybody else running their polling engines as VM's on VMWare has experience this problem or any other problems?

Thanks in advance for any feedback!

Find more posts tagged with

Accepted answers

All comments

FormerMember

I have all my 5 additional pollers and my main poller on VMs, along with my NCM and my additional webserver. my database is an MSCS cluster wth a fibre SAN

no issues with the VMs, they all have 4 vCPUs and 4 GB of RAM. i think i might need to move them to 64 bit and give more ram to them. i would like to see solarwinds go 64 bit then i woudl move it all to windows 2008 64bit

LGentile

Our 2 pollers are on VMware ESX (3.5) with 2 vCPUs and 3 GB of RAM (9,000 elements each) and run fine. The CPU is a consistent 60-70% but we haven't seen any ill effects from alerts or polling delays. Our Web server is also a VM and the DB sits on a physical server running within an x64 SQL cluster with SAN/fiber as well.

Our only issues are the Web server - sometimes things are a bit slow and using it is difficult for remote admins in other countries, so i've recently published a Citrix IE session to use the Web console with.

lchance

Just curious -

Do each of you also have Netflow Traffic Analyzer on your 'VMware' polling engine? Plus are you doing - SYSLOG and SNMP TRAPS - on that same server?

I'm having to justify (for budgeting) new 'physical' servers mostly because of NTA, one server with high performance disks with Raid 1-0 but management wants to virtualize our Solarwinds servers. This budget also includes extra servers and polling engine for redundacy of both Orion and SQL.

byrona

Just curious -
Do each of you also have Netflow Traffic Analyzer on your 'VMware' polling engine? Plus are you doing - SYSLOG and SNMP TRAPS - on that same server?
I'm having to justify (for budgeting) new 'physical' servers mostly because of NTA, one server with high performance disks with Raid 1-0 but management wants to virtualize our Solarwinds servers. This budget also includes extra servers and polling engine for redundacy of both Orion and SQL.

In our case we are not using NTA; however, we are using the Syalog and Trap receivers on the primary polling engine and the large volume of Syslog has caused us some problems as well.

byrona

For those of you are that are running your polling engines on VM's in VMWare, are you using any automated snapshot utilities such as SnapManager for NetApp or the VMWare vDR?

FormerMember

no auto snapshot stuff for us... only use snapshot for running windows updates and upgrades

i am about to ramp up my netflow usage, hoping it will not cause issue... i have the filegrup on a separate big LUN with loads of disks on raid 1+0 but have to wait and see

i woudl like to see the syslog and traps on a completely different database server then i would send everything at it