New Orion Server - Advice Requested

So I have the fortunate task of buying a BRAND NEW Dell server for Orion (and some other minor applications). After hearing the melays of folks who are running Orion on quad-core, dual-core, blah blah blah machines... I'm looking for suggestions.

Right now, I've picked out a dual quad-core processor machine running at 2.66 Ghz, 2x6 MB cache, 1333Mhz FSB. 8 gigs of memory, and tons of HDD space.

I'm sure (eh, I think) Orion is going to run fine on this box, however I thought I would seek out recommendations from those running some of the bigger instances. I'm slowly creeping out of SL500, but haven't made the jump yet. Also, my SQL Server is on another local server, not the same machine.

So the question is - If you were told to buy a new Orion server, no holds barred, what's your config?

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savell

As far as I understand, the pollers at the moment are single threaded (i.e. only capable of using a single processor instance). Raw Ghz speed is more important than how many processors or cores you have (although I sure Solarwinds has plans to change this).

If you database server is separate (and has good disk I/O performance) then the server you are suggesting will be more than adequate to support a reasonable number of elements. The separate database also means that the poller won't require much disk space.

On lower spec boxes we run to about 6,000 elements on each of our pollers without problem.

Dave.

douglak

We're also looking for a configuration for an SQL server.

My current Orion environment is NPM 9.0 with NTA 3.0. NTA is monitoring only eight Cisco routers, only one interface each, and only in one direction. It's throttling our Orion dedicated SQL server.

My current Orion dedicated SQL server is a Dell 2850 with two Dual-Core Xeon 3.0 GHz procs, 4 Gigs of RAM (actually more but its only using 4 Gigs), Windows 2003 Standard (32-Bit), SQL 2000 Standard (32-bit). The C:Drive (where the OS and SQL 2000 live) is two 73 GB, 15K RPM drives configured for RAID 1. The Drive (where the SQL data lives) is four 73 GB, 15K RPM drives configured for RAID1+0. It has one GigE NIC. Nothing else lives on this server.

We'd like to expand our Orion environment. We'd like to have NTA monitor more Cisco devices and add S-Flow monitoring. We also need to add the Application Performance Monitoring module, I own the wireless module, and we're upgrading our phone system to VoIP (so the Orion VoIP monitor is likely on that list as well). We're afraid to add anything else until we can get a good solid SQL server (we had to greatly pare back the NTA monitoring we were doing). Windows Perfmon is showing a lot of SQL Lock requests (resulting in NetFlow errors in the Event Viewer, stating there are deadlocked SQL issues if we start monitoring more than eight devices)

Here is what I'm going to recommend (management has said price isn't an issue, at least right now):

Dell server running two Quad-Core procs (fastest I can get), 16 GB of RAM (fastest I can get), Windows 2003 Enterprise (64-bit), SQL 2005 Enterprise (64-bit), and the same drive configuration as above.

I'm not sure this is going to fix our problem with SQL performance. I'm open to suggestions (probably can't sell management on a SAN). Would SAS or SATA drives perform better. We're using a Dell PERC 4/Di card... are there better controllers avaialble? I've even considered going with 128 GB solid state disks to increase performance.

Any ideas for a killer Orion dedicated SQL server?

mark_wiggans

af few more SQL ideas from Josh's blog..

jbaulsir

Orion 9.0 SP1 SLX with APM, Netflow and Voip - 3000 Elements

HP DL380 G5 dual Quad-core 3.16Ghz Processors

16 GB Ram - 12 GB for SQL 2005 (cu 6)

System - 72GB Raid 1 (2x72GB SAS Dual Port 15k RPM)

Data 410 GB Raid 5 (4x146GB SAS Dual Port 10KRPM)

This box kicks ass! (pardon the language)

douglak

jbaulsir:

Thanks for the feedback (I've always perferred HP boxes). Are you running the NetFlow Traffic Analysis module and if so, how many interfaces are you monitoring?

Thanks for the info!

jbaulsir

Yes, currently less than ten. but that depends on what we want to look at.