System for NPM

Since you will have 3 pollers (I would get 3 additional pollers and let NPM no poll anything) I assume you have a lot of elements being monitored.

In that case I would make all 4 boxes dual quad cores with 6+ GB of RAM.

That should be able to handle a good load without having any trouble with it.  Going to lower hardware will still work its just at some point you could have a bottleneck.

Where will you be putting the SQL DB?  That is the most important peice for SolarWinds and its performance directly affects how NPM will perform.

Where would you recommend putting it?  I run CA Spectrum right now and the DB for that is on the same box as "NPM" then web server is separate. So the language is a bit different switching to this product. I think I am hovering around 18k??? Elements right now on the test system I built.  I tried to ask the Solarwinds people this question, but it was one of my questions that was left unanswered.  And I would want at least Raid 10 on the DB box right?

On our test system my only gripe was that it was slow. Of course we were told it was the way it was all setup. Which was all on one box +one additional poller.. So I was running everything except the additional poller on the same box... It took forever to get to stuff through the web. Well at least a lot longer when use to using Spectrum.

If possible, make the SQL server a completely seperate server. We are seeing the effects of having everything on one server: web, NPM, and SQL...and we have FAR fewer elements than both of you guys.

I believe that RAID 10 is the recomended disk config...don't even think of RAID 5.

I was definitely planning on raid 10... So I would only need raid 10 though on the DB computer? The other one's just need to be loaded with speed and memory?? I do plan on building a lot of maps and nesting them together.

sonic6t9,

Two observations if I might....

Depending on the number of elements you have or think you will have in the future, you may not need 4 total polling engines on your network. Generally speaking, each poller will be able to comfortable handle 8-10,000 elements. If you have around 18,000 elements now, you should be able to get away with at most three pollers and a separate DB server (don't skimp on the memory there).

The other factor that I don't think has been mentioned is the aspect of polling across a WAN connection. How are your elements scattered geographically and topologically? You may need to consider separate DB installations and then install the EOC in order to maximize I/O performance. Is that an option for you?

We are just getting 3 polling engines. NPM slx, APM, netflow and all that.....  With majority of stuff I am at 18k I still have to add 350 or so ups's and stuff but that's minor compared to what has already been added.  I ran them on 2 polling engines but that was with a lot of issues because of the amount of stuff polling.... Plus it was on VM yadda yadda.........  We are looking to purchase actual systems for this and not VM.  All of this polling is our WAN. It is all around town.  We plan on eventually rolling all this stuff up to Microsoft SCOM.....    It is all over high speed fiber network though so latency shouldn't be an issue. It's all oc-48 and up.

We are getting NPM slx

NEtflow slx

APM al100

orion dl1000

engineers tolset

lansurveyor 

NPM slx polling engine 3