4 Replies Latest reply on Dec 17, 2010 3:51 PM by DirtySouth

Why put ORION app on different server than SQL server

MrSampsonite Dec 16, 2010 9:38 AM

Right now our ORION app is installed on the same server that's hosting the DB. It's our trial period. I see recommendations everywhere to separate the two. However I still have not seen a concise technical answer for why this recommended? If I put the app on a different server and go to the site, that site then passes the request to the db server, gets the results and renders them. Why is this better than not passing that request and response and just having everything on one server? There's an added cost to having another server (hardward/vm, licensing, etc)?

For that matter, if I have 5 people with orion accounts, do I need 5 SQL CALs? Or just 1 since the app is the only thing that connects to SQL?

Thanks!

Re: Why put ORION app on different server than SQL server

borgan Dec 16, 2010 9:53 AM (in response to MrSampsonite)

The reason is that SQL is so demanding of resources to support the high I/O to the database. There are many, many threads in Thwack discussing the ins and outs of this, but in short, if you have more than about 2000 elements (nodes, interfaces and volumes) monitored by Orion, then you will get much better performance out of the system by having SQL on its own server. Keep in mind that I am talking about only basic Orion NPM data. If you add any other modules such as APM or NetFlow (especially NetFlow), then that places even more demands on server resources.
If hardware availability is really a critical issue, then you may have no choice but to be very selective in what you decide to monitor with Orion.
Hope this helps.
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- Re: Why put ORION app on different server than SQL server
  
  MrSampsonite Dec 16, 2010 10:09 AM (in response to borgan)
  
  We do have APM with many perfmon counters polling. So are people recommending this setup:
  Server1: IIS and Orion APP
  Server2: Orion Poller
  Server3: Orion DB
  
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  - Re: Why put ORION app on different server than SQL server
    
    netlogix Dec 17, 2010 2:22 PM (in response to MrSampsonite)
    
    How many element? How Many APM Pollers?
    APM Pollers: https://orion/Orion/APM/Admin/LicenseSummary.aspx
    Elements: https://orion/Orion/Admin/Details/DatabaseDetails.aspx
    I have 800 APM pollers and 1900 elements running a virtual IIS/App server (2008 R2) and separate DB servers (2008 R2 Core. Yes, the DB is virtual too) and it runs really well.
    (oh, replace the "https://Orion" with whatever your Orion server is running)
    
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    - Re: Why put ORION app on different server than SQL server
      
      DirtySouth Dec 17, 2010 3:51 PM (in response to netlogix)
      
      As others have already said, it really depends on your environment and how may elements you're monitoring. In most cases though, you really should have a dedicated SQL box. SQL can be extremely heavy on IO reads & writes. The IO patterns on an IIS/Application server could be completely different. If you were to putt all three on the same physical server, you would create disk contention which would hurt performance.
      In our environment, we have 1 VM for NPM, APM & NCM apps and another physical SQL box full of 15K SAS disks in a RAID 10.
      
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