Using An Additional Web Server As The Primary Web Server...

Currently, I have 4 VMs for our core SolarWinds environment. (Orion Platform 2015.1.2, NCM 7.4, NPM 11.5.2, DPA 10.0.0, IVIM 2.1.0, SAM 6.2.2)

Orion01 = Primary Poller/Web Server

Orion02 = Additional Polling Engine

Orion03 = Additional Polling Engine

OrionDB = SQL Server

Nothing fancy there, just your standard setup.

When I need to do maintenance on my APEs, all I need to do is offload the devices being polled, and equally distribute them across the other 2 servers. This lets me take down one of my two APEs while I do my maintenance, without any loss in data/statistics. When I finish my maintenance, I turn the server on, redistribute/rebalance the devices again, and nobody notices a thing.

This works great for my APEs, but when I need to do maintenance on the primary poller, I have to put in the paperwork and schedule maintenance for server downtime.

So, basically, I would like to have a web server, and 3 polling engines.

OrionWeb01 =Web Server

Orion01 = Primary Poller

Orion02 = Additional Polling Engine

Orion03 = Additional Polling Engine

OrionDB = SQL Server

Will the Additional Web Server allow me to accomplish this? If I have the additional web server license, will I be able to take down any of the 3 polling engines/servers, while still maintaining the web server online for users to work in? Or, does the additional web server still depend on the primary poller to be doing all of the work? I would think the primary poller would then function the same as the APEs would, at that point, strictly as the data collectors, feeding everything to the db. And the additional web server would simply read and display the data from the db, and would not depend on any other server to function.

Any assistance/information on this would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you,

-Will

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Accepted answers

RichardLetts

The Primary poller controls all of the operations of the system -- the additional polling engines will pull the data if it is down but all of the alerting and much of the functionality (e.g. syslog, traps) will stop with the primary application server is down.

so -- sorry, I think you'll still need to schedule maintenance for now.

All comments

john.ta

AFAIK, the primary poller has no master role (short of web server), the only device with a master role is SQL server. Anytime you do maintenance on SQL server you will still need to put in paperwork and scheduled downtime, and of course no way to have multiple SQL servers. With that being said, I don't know much about additional web servers, however be advised you will need to change your URL's/IP's etc to point to a load balancer or something in order to dynamically move users between web servers.

RichardLetts

so -- sorry, I think you'll still need to schedule maintenance for now.

john.ta

That makes sense! Learn something new every day...

chadsikorra

Just some extra notes...I have an additional web server in my environment, but it still needs the primary poller to be up for the site to work on the additional web server. However, I do not have any additional polling engines in my environment.

wluther

Well poop!! It would have been super nice to be able to have the "brains" isolated over to a dedicated server, and the polling across other servers... Oh well... eventually... maybe... hopefully... ughh

Thank you,

-Will

hpstech

What about the case with an HA fail over, will the additional web server still work if the primary polling engine is down and the secondary HA box takes over?

Thanks