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Orion Platform: Preparing for the Upgrade to 2018.2

Starting with NPM 12.2, SolarWinds has embarked on a journey to transform your Orion deployment experience with fast and frequent releases of key deployment components. The first step was revamping the legacy installer to the new and improved SolarWinds Orion installer. The installer was able to deploy new or upgrade an entire main poller in one seamless session. The second iteration of the installer released the capability to do the same for your scalability engines. In this release NTA has been updated to utilize a MSSQL database, allowing us to happily say that the SolarWinds Orion installer is truly an All-in-One installer solution for your Orion deployment. For NPM 12.3, we have made tremendous scalability improvements that allow you to utilize even more scalability engines. As a result, your Orion deployment upgrades gain in complexity, so the installer team is providing additional updates to how you can stage your environment for minimal upgrade time.

Normal Upgrade Process

Using the All-in-One SolarWinds Orion installer, your upgrade process will look like the following.

Step one:

Review all system requirements, back up your database and if possible snapshot the Orion deployment. This will be especially important in this release, as the NTA Flow Storage database requirements have changed. Note: Flow Storage database refers to the database instance that stores NTA collected flow data. In previous versions this was utilizing a Fastbit database, but in this release has been updated to use MSSQL with a minimum version of 2016. An Orion database is the primary database that stores all polled data from NPM and other Orion products.

Step two:

Download the NPM 12.3 installer, selecting either the online or the offline variant according to your system requirements. Note: the SolarWinds Orion installer is

Step three:

Run the installer on your main poller and upgrade it to completion. If you have any other Orion product modules installed, the installer will upgrade this instance to the latest versions of those modules at the same time to maintain compatibility with the new Orion Platform 2018.2. If there are new database instances to be configured, that will be handled during the Configuration Wizard stage of the main poller upgrade. This release of the installer has a new type of preflight check that requires confirmation from you before proceeding. In the example below, is one for the NTA upgrade. Click for details to see the confirmation dialog and select yes or no.

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Configuration Wizard step for NTA:

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Step four:

If you don’t have any scalability engines, e.g Additional Polling Engines, Additional Websites or HA Backups you’re ready to explore all of the new features available in this version!

Scalability Engines

For those environments utilizing scalability engines or for those who are looking to try them out, this section will guide you through the process of deployment. Even if you have not utilized scalability engines previously, trying them out to test the scale improvements is incredibly easy. Like every SolarWinds Orion product, they are available for an unlimited 30-day free evaluation.

Deploying a fresh scalability engine is handled with the same installer that you downloaded for the main poller.

1. Copy the installer to your intended server and Click to “Run as Administrator”

Note: If you downloaded the offline installer, which is about 2 GB, the download process to your server can take some time and does not currently stage the scalability engine for faster upgrade. In the future, this is something we’d like to improve but is not an available feature for this release.  if you’d like to shorten the initial download of installer file to server, you can always use the online installer to set up your scalability engine. This installer file is about 40 MB so the download of installer file time to the server is much shorter. This will still meet offline requirements because when selecting the “Add a Scalability Engine” option, it will choose to download from the main poller to maintain version compatibility and does not require internet access. As always, the 40 MB scalability engines installer is also available for download from the All Settings -> Polling Engines page.

2. Select the “Add a Scalability Engine” option.

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3. Similar to the main poller upgrade process, at this point system checks that are specific to scalability engines will be run.

Note: Anything tagged as a blocker may need confirmation or action from you before proceeding.  If this is the case, address those issues and run the installer again. Things that are tagged as a warning or informational message are simply for your awareness and will not prevent your installation from proceeding. 

4. Select the type of scalability engine that you are looking to deploy, and then complete the steps in the wizard to finish your installation per your normal process.

Upgrading a scalability engine, is also handled through the same installer. However, this is where you have an opportunity to utilize our staging feature.

Note: If you were to proceed with your normal practice of putting the scalability engines installer on each server you need to upgrade, and then manually upgrading, that process will work perfectly well with no changes. Please read through the “Staging Your Environment for your Scalability Engines Upgrade” section below to see the alternative workflow that allows you to stage your environment.

Staging Your Environment for Your Scalability Engines Upgrade

For customers with more than a handful of scalability engines or with some distributed over WAN links, we noticed that they were occasionally experiencing extremely high download times from their main poller to their scalability engines. In addition, there was no centralized area where one could see the upgraded state of the scalability engines. Navigate to "All Settings", and click "High Availability Deployment Summary" and you will see the foundational pieces for an Orion deployment view.

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The Servers tab contains the original High Availability Deployment Summary content, and is where you can continue to set up additional HA pools and HA environment.

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Check out the new Deployment Health tab! You may not have heard of our Active Diagnostics tool, but it comes prepackaged with every install of the Orion Platform with test suites designed to test for our most common support issues. We've brought that in depth knowledge to your web console in the new Deployment Health view. With nightly run tests across your Orion Deployment, every time you come to this page you will see if there are any issues that could be a factor in the performance of Orion or your upgrades.

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You are able to refresh a check if you're working on an issue and wish to see an updated test result. If there are tests that you don't want to address, silence them to hide the results from the web console. Click on the caret to the right and you'll be able to see more details and a link to a KB article that will give you remediation advice.

On the Updates tab is where you will be able to stage your scalability engines.

The first page of the wizard will let you know if there are updates that are available to be installed on your scalability engines. At this point you've upgraded your main poller, so there are definitely updates available!  Click "Start" to get started!

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The second page is where we are testing the connection to each of the scalability engines. If we are able to determine the status of these engines, we'll give you the green light to proceed to the next step. Common issues that could prevent this from being successful could be that the SolarWinds Administration Service has not been updated to the correct version or is not up and running at this point. Click "Start Preflight Checks" to proceed.

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Similar to the Deployment Health tab, these are running preflight checks across your Orion Deployment. You'll be able to see all of the same preflight checks that were available through the installer client, except centralized to one view. If there are blockers present on this screen, you can still proceed in this flow if at least one scalability engine is ready to go, but please note down those scalability engines with blockers. You will need to address those blockers before an upgrade can occur on those servers. Click "Start download" to start the staging process.

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At this point, we are starting the download process of every msi needed to upgrade your scalability engines. In this example, I'm only staging one scalability engine, but if you  have multiple, you can see the benefits in time savings right away! All of the downloads will be triggered in parallel.

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Sit back and relax as we stage your environment for you. You can even open up RDP sessions to those servers with one click from this page.

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When everything has finished downloading, we will let you know which servers are ready to install. Click on the "RDP' icon to open your RDP session to the server.

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On your desktop, you should see the SolarWinds scalability engines installer waiting for you to click on and finish the upgrade.

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Visually you will run through the same steps that you normally would in clicking through the installer wizard. However, when you actually get to the installation part, you'll notice that there is no download appears in the progress bar. Finish your upgrade and move on to the next!

I hope you enjoy this update to how you can upgrade your Orion Deployment. I'm always looking for feedback on how we make this as streamlined as possible for you.