Is it possible to Virtualise a server running Orion Network Performance Monitor? I'm planning to virtualise my Orion system onto Vmware ESX v3.0.2. I'm currently running Orion v8.0.2 though planning to upgrade to V8.1 before I virtualise.
Has anyone had any experience of this? Any show stoppers or other issues?
Thanks
Andrew
I am running Orion and all the modules on Vmware ESXv3.0.2. I'm running orion 8.1 also,
Seems to work a treat. No issues at all.
We are also planning to run the HOT standby on vm too.
Sam
Sam,
Thanks and excellent news!
Sadly I've just discoveerd that my supoprt agreement has expired so I may have to do this with v8.0.2. Probably ok but...
Regards
Andrew,
Running 8.0.2 on a virtual machine is supported, but I'd encourage you to renew your maintenance agreement. We are about to release 8.5, which is a good step up from 8.0.2. We have an 8.6 not far in the future, and 9.0 is coming down the pike next year. We are aggressively investing in Orion, so you'll be missing out on a lot if you're not on maintenance.
Denny
Dnney,
Thanks for confirming that 8.0.2 can be virtualised. I've already harangued my manager about the apparent lack of maintenance. I suspect there's been a 'clerical error' since I remember ordering maintenance when we upgraded from 100 to 250 nodes.
Contact sales@solarwinds.com and explain the problem. They'll put you through to Customer Service to sort it out.
Works great for us, although we did learn something about VmWare:
DON'T clone from an image that already has IIS installed on it. Apparently a lot of the DCOM and other settings don't clone correctly. Orion will work just fine, but it will kill you if you also run Netflow! Uninstalling and reinstalling IIS doesn't fix the problem either.
I spent a day with one of Solarwind's developers trying to fix it. It turned out that using an image that didn't have IIS installed did the trick. The kind folks at VmWare will verbally admit there's an issue with this on ESX, but nothing in writing yet (still in the VmWare vs. Microsoft Blame-Assignment War).
Don
Don,
Hmm, now you've got me worried..
My Orion server does have IIS installed, but we don't use Netflow. So I should be ok ....
Of course if we ever want to use Netflow we could have a problem (though it might not be my problem by then :-) )
Did you cold clone (e.g. boot a cloning tool, such as VMware Converter, from CD) or hot clone (install an agent) ?
Either way, thanks for the warning
When we did our migration to VMware we didn't clone the existing Orion box - we did a re-install and import. We have a master server image that we base things off of - which now doesn't have IIS installed on it.
The problem (if you get it) is that all the charts in Netflow will be blank.
I have a test station running 8.5Beta3 SL100 on VMWare ( it was running 8.1 SL100 production) and I don't see any issues so far. I am planning to move our production environment 8.5 SLX web server and all functions except polling to VMWare, but keep the polling stations (3 x SLX) on hardware servers. Part of the issue is the response times between hardware-based polling and VMWare polling could lead to issues with the database, but I haven't seen that yet. We have almost 500 nodes and 19,000 elements in our Orion environment.
Jim
Are you cloning from a template and then going through the cusomization wizard or are you just cloneing an existing server and renaming it?
Converted to 8.5.1 SP3 on ESX 3.5 farm over the past weekend. We are extremely happy so far with the performance. Orion loves to chew up both cpu & memory, but as long as you size your ESX hardware appropriately, there shouldn't be any issue (which is true for just about any app, of course).
Hardware is HP DL380 G5 with 2xQuad-core & 16GB ram. Orion poller has 2 virtual cpus & 2.5GB of ram.
-Kevin