Software requirements for the Orion Platform server

This table lists software requirements and recommendations for a SolarWinds installation on both physical and virtual computers.

Type	Requirements
Operating system	Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2* Microsoft Windows Server 2016 Microsoft Windows Server 2019 *Support for Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2 is included in SCM 2020.2.6 so SCM 1.0 customers can upgrade to the latest version of SCM. For the best experience, SolarWinds recommends using Windows Server 2016 or 2019 for the Orion Platform server. Desktop operating systems, such as Windows 10, 64-bit (not Standard Edition), are supported for evaluation environments only. To make a smooth transition from your evaluation to production deployment, SolarWinds recommends that you avoid installing evaluations on desktop operating systems. Support differences between Orion Agents and SolarWinds Platform products You cannot install Orion Platform products on domain controllers. Exception: You can install Orion Agents on domain controllers. You cannot install Orion Platform products or any scalability engines on Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Exchange, or BlackBerry servers. Exception: You can install Orion Agents on the same server as a Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Exchange, or BlackBerry server.
Operating system languages	English (UK or US) German Japanese Simplified Chinese
IP address version	IPv4 IPv6 Dual stack CIDR notation is not supported for IPv6 addresses.
Web server	If you are not using Windows Authentication, make sure Anonymous Authentication is enabled for the default SolarWinds Orion website, NetPerfMon. Anonymous Authentication is used with the default, forms-based authentication. IIS is installed by the SolarWinds Orion Installer. You can install this software manually to reduce installation time or network bandwidth.
Installing Windows Account	Requires administrator permission on the target server.
File System Access Permissions	Ensure the NetworkService account has access to the system temp directory: %systemroot%\temp.
Microsoft IIS	Version 10.0 or later. DNS specifications require hostnames to be composed of alphanumeric characters (A-Z, 0-9), the minus sign (-), and periods (.). Underscore characters (_) are not allowed. SolarWinds does not support installing SolarWinds SCM on the same server or using the same database server as a Blackberry server.
Microsoft ASP .NET 2.0 Ajax Extension	Version 1 or later If this is not found on the target computer, the Orion Installer downloads and installs the component.
Microsoft .NET Framework	Version 4.8 Run the same version of .NET on your primary server and any Additional Polling Engines (APEs) or Additional Web Servers (AWS) in the environment. SolarWinds recommends installing .NET on your primary Orion server and all scalability engines before installing SCM. See this article for details.
Orion Platform Web Console browser	SolarWinds Platform products support the two most recent versions of the following web browsers available at the release date: Firefox Chrome The following browsers are also supported: Microsoft Edge Microsoft Internet Explorer In SCM 2020.2 and later, some pages are not compatible with IE11. If you are using IE11, you will see a warning message on incompatible pages. SolarWinds recommends using a different browser (such as Chrome, Firefox, or Microsoft Edge) for the best user experience with SCM. Do not enable Enterprise Mode on Internet Explorer. This setting forces Internet Explorer to emulate version 7, which is not supported.

Account privileges

SolarWinds recommends that Orion Platform administrators have local administrator privileges on the Orion Platform server to ensure full functionality of local SolarWinds tools. Orion user accounts limited to the Orion Platform Web Console do not require local administrator privileges.

Server port requirements

SolarWinds does not recommend the use of HTTP (Port 80). Please use HTTPS (Port 443) to ensure that any web-related connections are secure.

Port	Protocol	Service/ Process	Direction	Description
22	SSH	SolarWinds Job Engine v2 IIS	Bidirectional	Access ASA devices through CLI
25	TCP	SolarWinds Alerting Service V2	Outbound	Default port for SMTP email notifications. If SSL/TLS encryption is enabled on the SMTP server, use port 465.
53	UDP	SolarWinds Job Engine V2	Bidirectional	Resolving DNS queries
80	TCP	IIS	Inbound	HTTP default for the Orion Platform Web Console
161	UDP	SolarWinds Job Engine V2	Outbound	SNMP statistics collection, the default for polling
443	TCP	IIS	Inbound	Default port for HTTPS binding
445	TCP	File and Printer Sharing (SMB-In)	Bidirectional	Used to store firmware updates and configuration files remotely
465	TCP	SolarWinds Alerting Service V2	Outbound	Default port for SSL-enabled email alert actions
587	TCP	SolarWinds Alerting Service V2	Outbound	Default port for TLS-enabled email alert actions
1434	UDP	SolarWinds Alerting Service V2 SolarWinds Administration Service SolarWinds Information Service SolarWinds Information Service V3 SolarWinds Orion Module Engine SQL Server Browse Service	Outbound	Communication with the SQL Server Browser Service to determine how to communicate with certain non-standard SQL Server installations. Required only if your SQL server is configured to use dynamic ports.
5671	TCP	RabbitMQ	Bidirectional	For RabbitMQ messaging (AMQP/TLS) between the main polling engine and all Additional Polling Engines, High Availability servers, or Additional Web Servers.
17777	TCP	SolarWinds Orion Module Engine SolarWinds Information Service SolarWinds Information Service V3	Bidirectional	Orion module traffic. The port used for communication between the Orion Platform Web Console and the poller.
17778	HTTPS	OrionAgent	Inbound to the Orion server	Required for access to the SWIS API and agent communication

Ports 4369, 5672, and 25672 are opened by default. These ports can be blocked by the firewall.

Hardware requirements for the Orion Platform server

The following table lists minimum hardware requirements and recommendations for your Orion Platform server on physical computers, virtual computers, and cloud instances. Use the minimum hardware configuration if you are evaluating the product or do not anticipate heavy usage.

Feature	SCM 10 - 100	SCM 250 - 500	SCM 1000 - 2000*
CPU	Quad-core processor or better
Hard drive space	10 GB minimum 20 GB  recommended	20 GB minimum 40 GB  recommended	40 GB minimum 100 GB  recommended
Memory	6 GB minimum 8 GB recommended	8 GB minimum 16 GB  recommended	16 GB minimum 32 GB recommended

*For SCM 2000, see the Scalability section for more information.

Orion database server requirements

The following table lists software and hardware requirements for your SolarWinds Orion database server using SCM license levels. You must create the SolarWinds Orion database with the SolarWinds Configuration Wizard. Creating the database another way is not supported.

Do not install Orion Platform products on the same server as SolarWinds Access Rights Manager (ARM).

Type	Requirements
Language	SolarWinds supports using SCM with database servers set up in the following languages: English German Japanese Chinese
Microsoft SQL Server	SolarWinds supports Express*, Standard, or Enterprise versions of the following: SQL Server 2019 SQL Server 2017 SQL Server 2016 and SQL Server 2016 with SP1-SP2 SQL Server 2014 and SQL Server 2014 with SP1-SP2 SQL Server 2012** *Microsoft SQL Server Express is suitable for up to SCM100 license tier. To reduce disk utilization when using SQL Server Express, shorten the Detailed Statistic Retention period on the Polling Settings page. The default value is 7 days. See Optimize the database used by Orion Platform products, and see Additional database space requirements for more information on how much data can be consumed over time. **Support for SQL Server 2012 is included in SCM 2020.2.6 so SCM 1.0 customers can upgrade to the latest version of SCM. For the best experience, use SQL Server 2016 or later. SCM local SQL database uses SQL 2017 EE Advanced by default. SolarWinds recommends that you use Express versions only for evaluations and very small environments. Recommendations Use the 64-bit version of SQL Server. Use the Simple database recovery mode to ensure best performance. You can set the database recovery model to Full Recovery if your Orion database is hosted on a SQL Cluster or if you use Always On Availability. However, you must back up your database regularly and ensure that the volume where you store your transactions log has free space equal to or greater than the size of the Orion database. Transaction logs will continue to grow indefinitely until a database backup is performed and transactions are committed to the database. SolarWinds recommends daily database backups if using the Full Recovery model. You can use the following database select statement to check your SQL Server version, service pack, or release level, and edition: select SERVERPROPERTY ('productversion'), SERVERPROPERTY ('productlevel'), SERVERPROPERTY ('edition')
SQL Server collations	The following SQL server collations are supported: English with collation setting SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS German with collation setting German_PhoneBook_CI_AS Japanese with collation setting Japanese_CI_AS Simplified Chinese with collation setting Chinese_PRC_CI_AS SolarWinds supports a case insensitive (CI) database on a CS SQL Server. SolarWinds products do not support case-sensitive databases.
x86 components	The following x86 components must be installed: SQL Server System Common Language Runtime (CLR) Types Microsoft SQL Server Native Client Microsoft SQL Server Management Objects If the components are not found on the target computer, the Orion Installer downloads and installs the components.
	SCM 10 - SCM 100	SCM 250 - SCM 500	SCM 1000 - SCM 2000*
CPU	Quad-core processor or better	2 x quad-core processor or better
Memory	8 GB minimum 16 GB recommended	16 GB minimum 64 GB recommended	64 GB minimum 128 GB recommended
Hard drive space The amount of space needed by SCM depends on several variables in your environment. See Additional database space requirements for details.	20 GB minimum 50 GB recommended	100 GB minimum 250 GB recommended	200 GB minimum 500 GB recommended
	Due to intense I/O requirements, a RAID 1+0 drive is strongly recommended for the SolarWinds database, data, and log files with a dedicated drive for the server OS and tempdb files. Other RAID configurations can negatively affect SQL Server performance. Mirrored drives for the OS and RAID 1+0 for database data files are recommended. Solid state drives (SSDs) are recommended for all components. Some common files may need to be installed on the same drive as your server operating system. You may want to move or expand Windows or SQL temporary directories.
Authentication	Either mixed-mode or Windows authentication. If you require SQL authentication, you must enable mixed mode on your SQL server.
Other software	SolarWinds recommends installing the SQL Server Management Studio component on your Orion database server. The Orion Installer adds the following x86 components if they are not found on the Orion database server: SQL Server System Common Language Runtime (CLR) Types. Orion Platform products use secure SQL CLR stored procedures for selected, non-business data operations to improve overall performance. Microsoft SQL Server Native Client Microsoft SQL Server Management Objects For remote execution of PowerShell scripts, PowerShell 2.0 or later is required on the Orion Platform server, Additional Polling Engines, and target servers. You cannot share the SolarWinds Orion database with Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Exchange, or BlackBerry servers.

*For SCM 2000, see the Scalability section for more information.

**SolarWinds recommends the following hard drive configuration:

• A hardware RAID Controller with a battery backed-up write back cache
• Disk Subsystem 1 Array 1: 2x 146 GB 15K disks RAID 1 (mirroring) for the OS

• Disc Subsystem 2 Array 2: 2x 146 GB 15K disks RAID 1 (Pagefile + Extra Storage)

• Disk Subsystem 3 Array 3: with 6x 15K 146 GB or 300 GB disks configured in a RAID 1+0 array for SQL MDF and FILEGROUPS

• Disk Subsystem 4 Array 4: with 4x 15K 146 GB or 300 GB disks configured in a RAID 1+0 array for a SQL LDF Transaction LOG file

• Disk Subsystem 5 Array 5: with 4x 15K 146 GB or 300 GB disks configured in a RAID 1+0 array for a tempdb data file

• Disk Subsystem 6 Array 6: with 4x 15K 146 GB or 300 GB disks configured in a RAID 0 array for a tempdb log file

Microsoft Azure deployments

To deploy your Orion Platform product on Microsoft Azure, consider using the following instance types detailed in the table below, listed according to SCM license levels. For Microsoft Azure Managed Instance deployments, which SCM also supports, see the Orion Platform system requirements.

Requirements	SCM 10 - SCM 100	SCM 250 - 500	SCM 1000 - SCM 2000*
Orion server	DS12_v2	DS12_v2	DS12_v2
	4 CPU	4 CPU	4 CPU
	16 GB RAM	16 GB RAM	16 GB RAM
	150 GB disk	150 GB disk	150 GB disk
SolarWinds Orion database server in an Azure VM	DS4_V2 Standard	r4.D12_v2	D4_v2 Azure Storage Disk with Provisioned IOPS recommended
	8 CPU	4 CPU	8 CPU
	28 GB RAM	30.5 GB RAM	61 GB RAM
	System SSD 126 GB (included in Azure VM instance) + 1 TB for SQL database (included in Azure SQL Server Computer)	System SSD 80 GB (included in D12_v2) + Data Azure Storage Disk Volume 500 GB**	System SSD 160 GB (included in D4_v2) + 1x Data EBS Volume 150 GB + 2x Data Azure Storage Disk Volume 500 GB**
SolarWinds Orion database using Azure SQL database DTU Standard Tier***	S3 (100 DTU)	S3 (100 DTU)	S4 (200 DTU)
DTU Premium Tier	P1 (125 DTU)	P1 (125 DTU)	P2 (250 DTU)
vCore General Purpose Tier	1	2	2
vCore Business Critical Tier	1	2	2
	Important: SCM 2020.2.6 must run on Orion Platform 2020.2.6. The time zone setting of the Orion Server must be in the same time zone as the Azure SQL DB time zone (UTC). When deploying Azure SQL and creating a new user in the Configuration wizard, SA account credentials are required. When using Azure SQL for your database server, required tiers depend on whether you're using memory-optimized tables (In-Memory OLTP) supported in SQL Server 2016 and 2019 to improve the performance of transaction processing, data ingestion, data load, and transient data scenarios.
Azure SQL tiers if using In-Memory OLTP	DTU Tier P1	DTU Tier P2	DTU Tier P4
	vCore Business Critical Gen4 Tier 1	vCore Business Critical Gen4 Tier 2	vCore Business Critical Gen4 Tier 4
	vCore Business Critical Gen5 Tier 2	vCore Business Critical Gen5 Tier 2	vCore Business Critical Gen5 Tier 4
Azure SQL tiers without In-Memory OLTP	DTU Tier S3	DTU Tier S3	DTU Tier S4
	DTU Premium Tier P1	DTU Premium Tier P1	DTU Premium Tier P2
	vCore General Purpose Tier 2	vCore General Purpose Tier 2	vCore General Purpose Tier 2
	vCore Business Critical Tier 2	vCore Business Critical Tier 2	vCore Business Critical Tier 2

*For SCM 2000, see the Scalability section for more information.

**Azure Storage Disk volumes are not your dedicated hardware. Consider using Azure Reserved Instances of storage disk volumes for SQL servers.

***SolarWinds recommends that customers with large environments or environments with frequent changes use DTU Premium Tier, vCore General Purpose Tier, or vCore Business Critical Tier (rather than DTU Standard Tier), as these tiers allow more IOPS.

Additional database space requirements

The amount of space required by SCM depends on the number of nodes being monitored, the frequency of changes, the number of configuration items being monitored, and the average size of a configuration item. Use the following examples to help determine your needs.

Number of nodes monitored by SCM	Number of configuration items per node	Average size of configuration item	Frequency of changes	Additional database space recommendation
1000	100	10.00 kB	Once per week, every item changes	52 GB
			Once per day, every item changes	365 GB
	50	10.00 kB	Once per week, every item changes	26 GB
		5.00 kB		13 GB

SCM database monitoring requirements

Starting with SCM 2020.2, an ODBC driver is required. Drivers are automatically installed along with SCM. The following database versions can be monitored via out-of-the-box profiles using SCM:

• MS SQL versions 2012 and later
• MySQL versions:
  • 5.7
  • 8.0
• PostgreSQL versions:
  • 9.4.25
  • 9.5.20
  • 9.6.16
  • 10.11
  • 11.6
  • 12.1

There are no specific permissions needed by SCM for polling out-of-the-box database profiles. What is polled depends on what the user enters into the connection string field. SolarWinds recommends that you enter macros in the connection string to make use of credentials stored in the Orion Platform. If credentials are entered directly into the connection string, they are stored in plaintext.

Scalability

An Orion instance with SCM installed can process up to 280 changes/second combined. If you expect to have more than 1,000 agents per polling engine, you will need an Additional Polling Engine (APE).

See also Scalability Engine Guidelines for SolarWinds products.

Adding an APE enables you to collect data at a rate or volume beyond the capacity of a single SCM server. You can also use APEs for organizational purposes, so server configurations at each specific site are monitored by site-specific APEs.

APEs are already included with your SCM license. Therefore, you can have as many SCM-specific APEs as you need, and you don't need to purchase any additional licenses. To set up an APE for SCM, you just need to select the option Additional Polling Engine for Server Configuration Monitor when you install the APE using the SolarWinds Orion Installer.

By selecting Additional Polling Engine for Server Configuration Monitor during the installation of an APE, that included APE can poll only servers that are monitored with SCM or other products specifically mentioned as compatible with the APE during the installation.

More learning resources

To learn more about Orion Platform requirements and configurations, refer to:

• Orion Agent requirements
• High Availability requirements
• Port requirements for all SolarWinds products
• Deploy Orion Platform products to Microsoft Azure
• Multi-module system guidelines
• Scalability Engine Guidelines for Orion Platform products
• Orion Platform Optimization Guide