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Upgrade time - dreading it :-(

FormerMember
FormerMember

hi forum,

my first post on the re-vamped site... 

I am about to start planning for an upgrade of my solarwinds implementation.  it is quite a  big one, and i have not yet had a successful upgrade, every time it takes 6-12 hours to sort out, with a bunch of problems lingering for a month after.  so, looking for advice, horror stories or anyone done the same sort of upgrade.  this is where i am now:

software versions:

Solarwinds core -        2010.2 Sp1

NPM -                        10.1.1 Sp1

APM -                        3.5

IPSLA Manager -        3.5.1

NCM -                        6.0

NTA -                         3.7

(and looks like IVM 1.0 but i do not know what this is)

my environment is:

1 x primary NPM server

6 x Additional Pollers

1 x Additional webserver

NPM, APM, NTA and IPSLA are all installed onto primary and additional pollers

NCM resides on one of the additional pollers

questions

1. with the new release of APM, it can sit on its own poller now, but can i assume my NPM pollers still act as an APM poller if i do not want to separate them?

2. i am assuming i need to upgrade everything, starting with NPM as the other products will rely on them?

3. Solarwinds - how much have you tested this upgrade path with such an environment?  i know you can not test everything, but additional poller upgrade environment always see to fail

4. are the problems with TRAP parser rules being lost solved in current versions?

cheers all for help and support

D.

  • IVM - part of NPM for polling VMware

    1) I am not sure what you mean with this, but with 5.0 you must have NPM installed to integrate APM/SAM in the web console now.  In that last release or two, there was a way to have APM and NPM separate, but share a database and therefore a web console (I have no idea how, but I guess some people did it)

    2) I would start by upgrading NPM, work through any issues, then choose another instead of giving yourself 5 upgrades at once to worry about (unless you have outage windows you have to minimize)

    3) I'm not solarwinds - skipping

    4) Depending on how your alerts a set up, the varbind order has changed - I don't remember which version it was, but you might need to change some if you pulled specific varbind - i.e. ${vbdata5}.  There also was a bug where many traps got a generic type, but that was fixed in a latter release.

    Also, if you keep up to date (or only 6 months behind) upgrades usually go well (except the time they changed the syslog table layout - that hurt!) - Although I do not have nearly as large of an environment as you do.

  • Hi D.,

    One issue you will face is for NCM 7.0 it is no longer possible to have the main NCM server installed on your additional poller as it is considered a special NCM only poller. In order to upgrade you have the option of moving NCM or the additional poller to a different server. I would think moving the poller would be the easier task as you should be able to deactivate license and install on a new machine. Once the new poller is running you can then use node management to assign the nodes to the newly installed poller and then delete the old poller from the polling engines list once it has no nodes assigned. NCM may be a little more involved to move as the configured jobs are setup in the windows task scheduler, traps and syslogs may be setup to send to the server ect.

    Here is a good block about the NCM supported architecture as of 7.0

    http://thwack.solarwinds.com/community/solarwinds-community/product-blog/blog/2012/01/13/ncm-7-architecture-and-deployment

    In regards to your other questions:

    1. Correct you can keep using the same additional pollers for APM./NPM that you were in the past. I believe the change you are reffering to is that APM can now have additional pollers without requiring NPM.

    2. Yes NPM is the best place to start as many modules will be dependent on it. When trying to install components there will be a comparability checker that will tell you if need to install a specific version of a component first.

    3. We do perform integration testing with all our modules and the general rule is 2 major releases back.

    4. This should be resolved.

    Hope this helps!

    Let me know if I can be any more assistance.

  • FormerMember
    0 FormerMember

    Wish you luck.  Every time we upgrade its a hassle and never goes well.  We usually need to open a ticket.  Last upgrade of one poller, NTA, NCM and additional web server took 6 hours to sort out.  One before that a Solarwinds tech spent 4 hours doing.  I have no desire to ever upgrade again.