Building Orion for HA?

Downtime is unfortunately inevitable. Even with FoE, when it comes to an upgrade there's always downtime. The only way to eliminate it is to have a DR instance, but that would mean double the licensing costs AND you'll always have the ballache when it comes to separate databases, meaning there's not contiguous data in a single place, meaning reporting will always have gaps (unless you have a DBA who can stitch it all together for you).

As each update modifies the database schema, you can never run two different versions on the same database

Thanks for the response; that confirms what I believed to be true.

I guess I am curious what the value proposition of FoE is then?

FoE is designed to protect from application, network, OS, and hardware failures. Unfortunately as jezmarsh‌ stated above, that does not include zero downtime upgrades. At least not at this time.

aLTeReGo‌, thanks!  That is exactly the level of info I needed to take back to management.

Interesting that this question came up, as we have been discussing with some with staff at SolarWinds for our own implementation.  It isn't about updates as much, and more about if our primary SW instance is down for any reason, how do we still get alerts on our critical systems.  We are leaning towards just another instance (separate licenses, but less of them since we don't need everything monitored with it) and using it to alert only if our primary is down.  Not sure I am a fan of FoE and we don't need a full active / active scenario.

Depending on what level you wanted the HA at, you could also use SQL and VMWare replication; this obviously wouldn't help you at the application level though.

My thoughts on this:

Assuming one has poller A, B and C running normally.

Have three alternate pollers, Alternate-A, Alternate-B, Alternate-C waiting as standby (passive) pollers.

In the case where something happens to pollers A, B or C, assuming that Windows itself is still booting, deactivate the licenses on the primary pollers (a, B or C) and activate the licenses on the alternate pollers. If you can't deactivate the licenses using the License Manager app, then request new keys form Customer Service.

This doesn't help with the DB end but that's mostly a matter of sufficient MS SQL licensing rather than SolarWinds licensing.

That could work, but it would be a very manual task. Certainly not something most people would want to wake up at 3am for. This is also highly dependant upon the OS booting to reclaim the license. If you applied a Windows Update that's causing you server to blue screen upon bootup (like that's never happened) then this would entail a phone call the Customer Service to reclaim the license key.