ORION Network Performance Monitor on ESX server

Question

My company was running ORION Network Performance Monitor on a virtual machine running on ESX server from VMware.  This was the only VM running at the time on this ESX server and the server had dual 1 GHz processor with 4 GB of RAM.

The performance on this box was horrible; especially when loading the initial web summary page.  The page would take about 30 seconds to load.

We installed ORION onto a different stand-alone server without ESX. We then backed up the database and reports and restored them on the new server. The new server has dual 2.80 GHz processors and only 1 GB of RAM.  Performance improved dramatically.  The initial web summary now takes only 3-5 seconds to load.

My assumption is that there was a processor bottleneck.

Does anyone know if there are any known issues with running ORION as a virtual machine on ESX server from VMware?

Thanks and your help is much appreciated.

richie917 · Answer

We run Orion NPM and all tools on VMware including the SQL backend on a separate Virtual Machine.  Our ESX Host has 2xQuadCore2.33GHz Xeons with 16GB of Ram of which we assign 2 virtual CPU's and 4GB of RAM to the Virtual Machines.  Orion NPM generally performs ok on this setup although initial entry into the default page takes around 10 seconds or so but other pages load fine, within 2 seconds or so.

SQL Server performs fine in a Virtual Machine and despite what some may say it is very VMware friendly providing you make the right provisions.  SQL server will grab as much RAM as you assign to it and keep it which is fine as long as you have enough RAM in the ESX host to cope with that, but on other hand it will relinquish CPU cycles when not required so if you mix this type of VM with other VM which don't require as much RAM but do require more CPU then you have a good balance.

jasnicholas · Answer

I have done some inital testing with Orion and ESX. As long as you have the SQL server on a physical box not a VM it runs great. SQL is not a VM friendly application since in grabs all available memory and locks it for its own use. VM is designed for applications that let go of resources not currently in use which does not fall in the SQL catagory.

pwinterhalder · Answer

Currently we run Orion on an HP DL360 and the SQL database on an HP DL380.  I am about to embark on a hardware consolidation project by moving both (among many other servers) to a VMWARE environment.  There doesn't appear to be much discussion about this and this article makes me nervous!  If I go ahead, I will post my findings to this article.  Phil.