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 At some point I'm guessing we won't be able to update Solarwinds because it will complain VMAN is too out-of-date.