Community
- Command Central
- MVP Program
- Monthly Mission
- Blogs
- Groups
- Events
- Media Vault
Products
- Observability
- Network Management
- Application Management
- IT Security
- IT Service Management
- System Management
- Database Management
Content Exchange
- SolarWinds Platform
- Server & Application Monitor
- Database Performance Analyzer
- Server Configuration Monitor
- Network Performance Monitor
- Network Configuration Manager
- SQL Sentry
- Web Help Desk
Free Tools & Trials
Store

Server specs - Need suggestions

Over the past 6 months I have convinced management to spend around $26K on software upgrades and a new dedicated database server for Orion. Now it looks like we need a bigger/better front end for Orion to run on. I need to design a server that will last us as I will be cut off after this purchase. Here is our current environment:

HP Blade Server

Dual-Core 1.8Ghz w/8 GB RAM running Windows 2003 Standard SP2

Orion SL2000 - 207 nodes and 755 interfaces (more will be added). Netflow with 77 interfaces. VoIP module (not currently active, but will be once we bring up new Cisco VoIP solution for 25 sites). We are also now looking at purchasing APM (not sure how many licenses).

I would like to jsut go ahead and size this new front end to have everything for Orion-SL2000 up and running so I am covered for future upgrades. We are also running 1 Engineer's toolset on this server and have syslog and traps being sent here. Cirrus is running on a separate VM, but it would be nice to have it on the same Orion server.

I know Orion is not yet a multi-threaded app and that is part of my issue, but can it now run on 64-bit OS? Would a blade server be appropirate or should I look for a standalone?

Support suggested a dual-core 3.0 Ghz server, but I want to make sure we will not outgrown it in 6 months as I am sure management is going to stop spending money on this app very soon until I get produce everything I have promised them. Any help in this matter is appreciated.

Thanks!

Find more posts tagged with

Accepted answers

All comments

Congo

Do you anticipate your network elements going up drastically in the near future?

If not, I think that your current hardware will be fine for the small ammount of devices you have.

A blade server shouldnt differ any from a standalone.

All I would recommend is a similar blade add in for your database server. And maybe swap out that 1.8 with the highest that the socket can support and the blade can still keep cool.

FormerMember

I know Orion is not yet a multi-threaded app and that is part of my issue, but can it now run on 64-bit OS? Would a blade server be appropirate or should I look for a standalone?

Just to be clear, Orion is mostly multi-threaded. In particular, the job engine that APM uses is completely multi-threaded. The only part of NPM that isn't multi-threaded yet is the standard SNMP poller. Syslog, Traps, the UnDP, NetFlow, APM, etc. are all multi-threaded.

rgeorges

When is the SNMP poller scheduled to be multi-threaded, Q4Y08, Q1Y09, etc..? It would be great if the poller engines could support more than 8,000 interfaces before they begin to bog down. I'd like to see each poller be able to support at least 12 - 15K interfaces.

Ramon

FormerMember

No clear date on that. It's also not certain that making it multi-threaded will necessarily increase capacity in the way you expect. There are other bottlenecks in the process, and there are other things we may need to do with extra capacity.

DirtySouth

Good thread. Quick question though...I've got NPM and soon NCM running on a Dual duel-core AMD Opteron 2GHz server with 4GB RAM. It's a 64-bit CPU, but running only 32-bit Server 2k3. Do any of you think I would benenfit at all from puting a 64-bit OS on it running the same apps?

pguenther

OK This concerns me as I am being told the opposite. If netflow is multi-threaded then why is my Dual Core 1.8 GHz with 8G of RAM not sufficient. Support and a sales engineer have all told me that the application is only using a single 1.8GHz processor. I am scambling to find a server that meets the 3GHz I am being told I need. I cannot ask for more hardware at this point due to the amount of money spent on the product in the last 6 months already. I am getting ready to move to an older server that is a single core 3.0Ghz with only 4G of RAM. I only have 209 nodes, 695 interface and 282 volumes with 83 Netflow interfaces, but these numbers will increase as we ar rolling out a lot of new stuff. (SL-2000) license. I do not want to move the server to a 4 year old server and wind up with more problems.

FormerMember

If netflow is multi-threaded then why is my Dual Core 1.8 GHz with 8G of RAM not sufficient.

The bottleneck on NetFlow isn't the receiver, it's the database I/O. Even if you had 8 cores processing data, you'll eventually hit performance problems with getting data in and out of the database. What's important to NTA performance is that the database have its own server with plenty of RAM (8 GB would be good) set to RAID 1.0 with other DB tuning to optimize R/W.

If Support or SEs implied that everything was single-threaded, they mis-spoke, and I'll look into that.

pguenther

Denny,

Thanks for the help here. My database server is not an issue. We just spent a couple of grand on a stand alone dedicated server. The specs are as follows:

Quad-Core 2.10 GHz with 16GB of RAM running 64-bit Windows Server 2003 Enterprise SP2. SQL 2005.

My old DB server was a problem, but this one does not have the writing issues the other one did. Oh high speed (15K) local drives too. Although SQL is using 15 GB of RAM disk I/O is running fine. Raid is 1.0.

If you have any other idea for DB tuning please let me know and I will take them to my DB admin.

In your opinion should my current front end Orion server have sufficient resources? What happens is every 30 hours or so I get a ton of netflow errors (deadlocks, system exceptions and out of memory) in my event log for about 1-2 hours and finally the netflow service stops and will not restart automatically. If this happens overnight or on the weekend I loose hours sometimes days of data.