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"Soft cutover" NPM migration

leroyplock over 8 years ago

Hello.

We are migrating our NPM front end (same database) but do not want to do a hard cutover, we want to migrate gradually, to avoid any unanticipated production issues.

After reading some documentation and talking with SW 1st level support, we believe we can do the following:

1. Install an additional poller on the new server, running under the 30 day eval license. (We have to use the special additional poller installer.)

2. Gradually migrate the monitored devices by changing their polling engine. Operations will continue to use the gui from the original server.

3. After the polling engine for all nodes has been changed to the new server, we will transfer our license to the new server and shut down the old.

The documentation seems to say you can do this gradual migration just by installing NPM on the new server (no special additional poller executable), but SW support insists we need the special installer, so that's confusing.

Thanks for any feedback.

Top Replies

sean.martinez over 8 years ago +1 verified

You cannot use the Additional Polling Engine then change it to the Primary Server. The Additional Poller Lacks alerting and the Web Console, so if you migrated and turned the old off, nothing could be…

0 sean.martinez over 8 years ago
You cannot use the Additional Polling Engine then change it to the Primary Server. The Additional Poller Lacks alerting and the Web Console, so if you migrated and turned the old off, nothing could be viewed from the web and alerts would not function.
If you only have 1 Solarwinds Server, what would be best to do is:
Backup the database
Restore the Database (possibly new Name)
Install Solarwinds Products on new server as 30 day Eval
Have new Products connect to the backed up and restored database
When everything is finished, go into Manage Nodes, select all devices and under More Actions Set to the New Server, remove the old polling engine.
Test to ensure that the new server functions correctly and data is being polled
Deactivate License on old Server, Activate on New.
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0 leroyplock over 8 years ago in reply to sean.martinez

Thanks for the reply.
After installing the additional polling engine, I see you are correct. (I was specifically told by SW support this would work!)
I called back into support, got a different tech, and he told me basically what you're saying. The only quibble is that the database backup/recover is not strictly necessary, you can have both old and new using same DB during transition. Obviously using a copy of the DB is safer. In our case, we have a good backup of the database and were comfortable having both old and new using same.
I had to run the configuration wizard 3 times before it came up clean, but we're looking pretty good now, working through some minor issues yet. The old server remained online and looking good the entire time.
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0 leroyplock over 8 years ago in reply to leroyplock

Well as it turns out what the second tech told me doesn't work either. The new server installs itself as a primary polling engine. It originally shows up as available when you start services, but after 60 seconds will go to "possibly down," then within 2 minutes go to "down." Had a SW tech look at it for 2 hours, and he basically said "yes this should work, but we can't get it to work." So now we're going to try the method sean.Martinez suggested (backup and restore copy of DB).
It's a bit disconcerting that I've been told 2 different method for doing this by sw support and neither work...
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0 jrlane1 over 7 years ago in reply to leroyplock

So the accepted answer for this thread is good to go, or what did you end up doing?
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