Orion Platform

Question

Good morning, I am new to the SolarWinds world and I have been tasked to upgrade our environment which entails NTA, NCM, NPM, SEM & SAM which are all running on Windows Server 2012 R2 and Windows SQL 2016. I understand that we need to upgrade our windows environment also but can I get some suggestions or instructions on upgrading? I've contacted support but they mentioned we are on an EOL version, Orion Platform 2017.3.4.SP4 and they cannot assist with this upgrade.

patrickharney · Answer

Thank you for your feedback, this definitely helps. Our plan was to get a windows 2020 server stood up along with a 2019 windows SQL server. These servers would be a different but similar name/IP compared to the existing environment, then we would back up all our data while getting the applications going on the new server in order to initiate a backup upload to the servers. We intend to shut down the old servers once the data has been backed up and then change the new environment's name/IP to the old one so we don't have to update any ACLs on all our nodes.

sguido · Answer

Those are some pretty big jumps you need to make.  A few ideas come to mind, but how you'll attack this depends on how you go about building servers and your organization's tolerance for SW being down.

My first idea is to build all of your new servers (new names and IPs).  Migrate you database to the new version of SQL.  Then shut down your Orion server and rebuild it.  Use that new Orion server to build new polling engines, web servers, etc on the other servers.  Then you should be able to remove the old pollers, etc from your environment.

This may be easier/harder with HA.  I don't know how HA will operate with such a large jump in SW versions.  It may be fine, in which case you'll be able to use the failover abilities to decrease downtime.

One final note, more as food for thought.  I inherited an SW environment several years back that was having a variety of issues related to how the environment was built and grew over time.  The hack was a strange opportunity for us, when it happened we decided to completely rebuild our SW environment.  We rebuilt the servers and the SolarWinds components, rediscover the nodes, and recreate alerts.  Everything but the hardware was new.  It actually took less time than we had expected and the environment was greatly improved and is much more reliable.  We were able to apply all the lessons we had learned from running the environment for so long.  So a good option could be to build a brand new SW environment.

Can you let us know a little bit more about your environment and your upgrade options/plan?