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VMAN 8 - appliance discontinued, VMAN becomes incorporated in to main poller

I welcome the integration of VMAN with Solarwinds, but now it seems the CentOS appliance is being discontinued and the functionality (or some of it) is being incorporated in to the main poller.   We paid a fortune for the appliance to add functionality to Solarwinds and provide extra graphs and reporting, and maintenance is 60% higher than our SAM ALX license.  Is this really good value for money?  We wanted to keep the load off our main poller but Solarwinds are saying to install VMAN right there on the main poller, and transfer the database in to the Solarwinds database.  My problem is;

- the main poller is heavily used (it's a separate physical machine)

- the additional poller is heavily used (VMs now but will become a physical soon)

- the database server is a separate physical, HP Blade with integral SSD.

This keeps the load off our production ESX systems, it keeps the database I/O (which is intense) off the SAN, and doesn't interfere with production systems.  It doesn't slow them down, and if they go down it does not, it's independent.

Now we're being told we need to install VMAN 8 (isn't that a quite big product) on to our main poller, loading it up even further, and making the Solarwinds database very big.  I don't know how big the data is in the VMAN system - and technical support didn't answer my question either.   We'll need to review whether we keep VMAN since I'm not sure it is worth the hasstle of trying to push the main poller to its limits, or causing I/O issues with the SQL database. 

Who has been brave and done it?  I can't find any VMAN videos newer than 2 years ago.  Normally as soon as a new release is there I'm deploying it, but this is such a radical change that I'm putting the intended update on hold, and we were just about to renew our maintenance - that will have to go on hold too.   What happens if we just keep VMAN as it is?   At some point I'm guessing we won't be able to update Solarwinds because it will complain VMAN is too out-of-date.

  • I've decided I'm going to have a go.  From what I have learned much of the VIM data is already in the Solarwinds database - it has been fed in over time.   The new polling is streamlined so should be more efficient.  I'm already running on a physical machine with 24 cores and 72gb ram, so performance is fairly good.

  • Hi,

    only some infos:

    - VMAN Appliance as a separate poller continues - so you don't have to migrate, and you can use CentOS VMAN as before

    - VMAN appliance has own database. VMAN appliance is collecting data from hypervisors, store it in own database and then send results from latest polls to VIM/Orion. There is another processing and data are stored in VIM/Orion database -> Orion database will be approximately same also with VMAN Orion poller

    - with VMAN Orion poller - all colletions/polls will be executed directly from Orion machine, but it shouldn't rapidly increase poller utilization (I guess it will be approximately Orion machine until now + VMAN appliance utilization)

    - if utilization on main poller is too high, you can deploy new Free Poller (something like additional poller) - it is working on new VMAN Orion poller -> so you will spread virtualization polling utilization to more machines

  • Found a couple more things.  You have to put polling in to basic mode if you have an agent on Hyper-V host.  It then warns that some metrics won't be available.

    Also, the appliance OS doesn't get upgraded when you upgrade the appliance.  You have to build a new VMAN appliance then migrate all the data.  I have something like 400-600GB of data in the appliance.

    There see to be no real details of this FREE (nothing is for free) poller.   I had wanted to build a new machine, based on Windows 2016, and put the VMAN polling on there, then perhaps one at another UK datacenter, and one in the US datacenter.  At the moment I have the VMAN appliance in London, a collector in another UK site, and one collector in the US.  That's sort of what I want to replicate.  

    More and more of VMAN has been incorporated in to the main poller anyway - like recommendations.  I can envisage three Windows 2016 servers, 3 small VMs to act as collectors, which will put the data in the Orion database - still don't know how I'd get the historical data in to the Orion database - somebody said there was a configuration wizard which might do that, but in discussions with Solarwinds they suggested leaving the data on the appliance, keeping it, and swapped primary/secondary licenses, then using the old VMAN appliance for some reporting.

    Not getting very far - at home I can install VMAN 8 (for Hyper-V) and the machine can be configured later because it gets a DHCP address, but at work the VLAN doesn't have DHCP so I try to use the script to configure the IP and I just get errors everywhere and it doesn't set anything.   The VMware VMAN 8 appliance might work more easily because the IP is set as part of the OVF installation.

  • - unfortunately, agent polling is not supported by new VMAN Orion poller. Just be careful, basic polling is really basic.

    - upgrading VMAN 7.1 to 8.0 is possible with hotfix 2, but you will stay on old CentOS. Full upgrade between VMAN Appliance (to get new centOS) is not possible. But its possible to just connect disk from old VMAN to new one.

    - FREE poller - it means, that additional poller license is not needed, so its free. You just need to have virtualization license in main orion poller. It should be replacement for VMAN federated collector. (data-sources polled by FP are counted to main license)

    - I don't think there is a way, how to migrate old data from VMAN appliance to Orion db

  • I am having issues with this as well.  I keep getting license issues.  The licensed socket amount keeps bouncing around on the Orion side.  It also would like to know more about this free poller.  I would like to turn the old appliance into this.  And I want to keep the data from the old appliance.  I want to still use the old appliance for some nodes and move others the the new integrated setup.  I also ran into the static IP issue with the brand new 8.0 Hyper-V appliance.  I had to configure it by cmd line in the appliance.  Needless to say, this has not gone very smooth.  I have not been happy with this at all.

  • Christopher, Sorry about your difficulties, I just sent you a DM

  • goodzhere, did you ever get a resolution for your licensing errors/issues with Orion VMAN?

    Just seeing this problem crop up again ourselves. VMAN appliance (primary license, integration enabled) shows 318 sockets in use out of a licensed 480, VMAN Orion decided we are using all 480 sockets earlier this afternoon.....

  • Yes.  I did.  I put the main license on the primary poller and also upgraded.  The restarted and it cleared up.

  • Just to close the loop on this, per support my issue is a common one, and the only workaround is to remove and then re-enable VMan integration with the appliance in Orion.

  • Hey Jonathan, I just wanted to follow up with you, after you moved off of the appliance do you have any feedback you'd like to share about the experience? Anything that you wish had been better? I'd love to jump on a call with you and get more details.