THWACK Tuesday Tip :: Best Practices for Orion Upgrades

KMSigma

FEATURED EPISODE:

Best Practices for Orion Upgrades

December 22, 2020

Upgrading your Orion Platform products may seem daunting, but there are just a few steps to follow. THWACK Technical Content Manager Kevin M. Sparenberg will review how to identify your current versions, decode version numbering, show you the easiest way to upgrade, and show you how to migrate your Orion Platform products to new hardware, if you prefer.

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schrumma

I updated on Monday and took less than 40 minutes. Very nice!

Southfield

Take a full backup of your Orion database. The Orion database holds all your production information except for reports created using Report Writer.
- Note: If you have an automated backup solution in place, verify that there is a current backup before completing an upgrade.
Proceed on backing up the Reports folder. It holds all of the canned and customized Report Writer reports.
- By default, the Reports folder on a 32 bit OS can be found in C:\Program Files\Solarwinds\Orion.
- By default, the Reports folder on a 64 bit OS can be found in C:\Program Files x86\Solarwinds\Orion.

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pr261298

Thanks a lot very informative.

Planning to upgrade on next week after Christmas...

I have prepared hardware & Software requirement for upgrade activity (2020.2.1 HF2)

Currently we are using 2017.3.5. So, please suggest a video or document to watch this migration steps.

Regards

Premnaseer A

KMSigma

@Southfield - those aren't the only folders to back up if you are running a version over two years old - there are a few others. Those are listed explicitly in the linked migration documents, so be sure to review those before migrating to new hardware.

@pr261298 - you are going to want to review the Product Upgrade Advisor and put in all the versions you are running and the versions you want to move towards. It'll tell you all the steps necessary to move. There's also another article about someone who did the same thing. You can probably reach out to the author to get more details.

pr261298

Thanks for your response.

Referred product upgrade advisor and prepared hardware and software requirements based on it. Will check the another article shared me for the same upgrade platform.

Need your address on the below queries:

NPM -12.2 NCM -7.7 and NTA -4.2.3 and NTM -2.2.2 (Our environments modules) --- don't we have recent upgrade for NTM version?

As our NTA 4.2.3 FSDB model - Will it be okey to go for same SQL database as the recommended one? (or) better to go for separate database (will install SQL platform on existing NTA server) to avoid orion database slowness issue. So which will be better one?

(Because, we are planning to send around 100000 + FPS by using NTA also we are having 1 Main polling and 9 APE(on 3 servers, each server 3APE so 3*3=9) with respective of 75000 + elements)

Avoiding recommended method because of this - https://documentation.solarwinds.com/en/Success_Center/NTA/Content/NTA-Deployment-options.htm

So need your opinion on the same.

Regards
Premnaseer A

KMSigma

@pr261298 Network Topology Mapper doesn't run on the Orion Platform, so an upgrade there is independent of the Orion upgrades.

Cohabitating your Orion and NetFlow database is 100% supported if your SQL server has enough resources and is running SQL Server 2016 SP1 or later.

You'd have to review the general sizing recommendations here.and more specific question for NTA sizing should go in the NTA forum.

In my lab, the SQL server is a single instance running 2016 SP1 with 256 GB of RAM and 32 logical cores on a physical server. It's running multiple Orion installs with NTA and Log Analyzer and runs fine.

pr261298

@KMSigma

Thanks for your support.

I have referred multiple-module hardware-software path as you suggested and prepared below setup.

My Current setup for SQL: ( for 75000 Elements) - SQL 2014 SP2 - Virtual Machine

CPU(No. of) - 12 Core 2.10 GHz Intel Xeon®E5-2683 v4

RAM (GB) - 128

Hard drive - 2TB

NIC - 2

Planning for upgraded one: Software, i will go for SQL 2019 Enterprise version. - Virtual Machine

CPU(No. of) - 32 Core 2.4GHz (or) Faster

RAM (GB) - 256

Hard drive - 2TB + 1 (TB for NTA)

NIC - 2

Also i will refer the NTA link which shared by you.

Thanks a lot once again.

Regards

Premnaseer A

simonp73

Is there any reason why the offline installer for 2020.2.1 HF2 are all ISOs rather than applications as per previous downloads/upgrades?