Documentation forSolarWinds Platform

Orion Platform 2017.3 Requirements

Release Date: September 13, 2017

SolarWinds strongly recommends that you install the Orion Platform on a server that is neither public, nor internet-facing. To learn about best practices for configuring your Orion Platform installation securely, see Secure Configuration for the SolarWinds Platform.

Important: These system requirements define the minimum requirements for all products on Orion Platform 2017.3. Products may have different requirements, such as OS or memory, and may differ per license level.

For additional information on requirements and configurations, see the Multi-module system guidelines. You should also review your product administration guides and release notes for the exact product requirements beyond these minimums.
We also recommend reviewing the Orion Platform 2017.3 Release Notes.

  • Your Orion server and your SolarWinds Orion database must use separate servers.

Software requirements

  • SolarWinds only supports installing the Orion agent on domain controllers. Do not install any other SolarWinds products on domain controllers.
  • SolarWinds does not support the installation of any Orion product on the same server as a Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Exchange, or Research in Motion (RIM) Blackberry server, nor do we support sharing a database server with those applications.

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

Software Requirements

Operating system

Production Evaluation Environments Only
  • Windows Server 2012 and 2012 R2
  • Windows Server 2016
  • Windows 8.1 (not Standard Edition)
  • Windows 10

Installing SolarWindsOrion Platform products on Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials or Windows Server Core is not supported.

Operating system languages

  • English (UK or US)
  • German
  • Japanese
  • Simplified Chinese

IP address version

IPv4

IPv6 implemented as a dual stack

CIDR notation is not supported for IPv6 addresses.

Web server

Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS), version 8.0 or later

IIS is installed by the SolarWinds installer. You can install this software manually to reduce your installation time or network bandwidth.

.NET Framework

.NET 4.6.2

Run the same version of. NET on your primary server and any Additional Polling Engines or Additional Web Servers in the environment.

Web console browser

  • Microsoft Internet Explorer version 11 or later with Active scripting
  • Microsoft Edge
  • Firefox 49.0 or later
  • Chrome 54.0 or later

Do not enable Enterprise Mode on Internet Explorer. This setting forces Internet Explorer to emulate version 7, which is not supported.

Other
  • RabbitMQ (primary messaging service between the primary and additional polling engines)
  • MSMQ (fall back and legacy messaging)

Services

The following services must be running after installation is complete to collect syslog messages and traps:

  • SolarWinds Syslog Service
  • SolarWinds Trap Service

Account privileges

SolarWinds recommends that SolarWinds Orion administrators have local administrator privileges on the Orion server to ensure full functionality of local SolarWinds tools.

SolarWinds Orion user accounts limited to the Orion Web Console do not require local administrator privileges.

Server port requirements

  • Ports 4369, 25672, and 5671 are opened by default on the main server for RabbitMQ messaging. These ports can be blocked by the firewall. When running SolarWinds High Availability, ensure ports 4369 and 25672 are open.
  • RPC ports > 1024 (TCP, bidirectional) is used by the Job Engine v2 process to communicate with Windows nodes.

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 Encryption12
12 UDP SNMP Informs Bidirectional Receiving trap messages n/a

user defined, default: 22

SSH

SolarWinds Job Engine v2

IIS

Bidirectional Port for accessing ASA devices through CLI Device-based

25

TCP

SolarWinds Alerting Service V2 Outbound

SMTP port for non-encrypted messages

n/a
53 UDP SolarWinds Job Engine v2 Outbound Resolving DNS queries n/a

80

TCP

IIS Inbound

Default additional web server port. If you specify any port other than 80, you must include that port in the URL used to access the web console. For example, if you specify an IP address of 192.168.0.3 and port 8080, the URL used to access the web console is http://192.168.0.3:8080. Open the port to enable communication from your computers to the Orion Web Console.

The port might also be used for Cisco UCS monitoring.

n/a

161

UDP

SolarWinds Job Engine v2 Outbound

Sending and receiving SNMP information.

SNMP v1 and v2 are unencrypted. SNMP v3 uses AES and 3DES encryption.

162

UDP

SolarWinds Trap Service Inbound

Receiving trap messages

n/a

443

TCP

IIS Inbound

Default port for https binding.

Also used for bi-directional ESX/ESXi server polling, or for Cisco UCS monitoring.

SSL

465

TCP

SolarWinds Alerting Service V2 Outbound

SMTP port used to send TLS-enabled email alert actions.

SSL

514

UDP

SolarWinds Syslog Service Inbound

Receiving syslog messages

n/a

587

TCP

SolarWinds Alerting Service V2 Outbound

SMTP port used to send TLS-enabled email alert actions.

TLS

1433

TCP

SolarWinds Alerting Service V2

SolarWinds Administration Service

SolarWinds Information Service

SolarWinds Information Service V3

SolarWinds Orion Module Engine

Outbound

The port used for communication between the SolarWinds server and the SQL Server. Open the port from your Orion Web Console to the SQL Server.

n/a

1434

UDP

SolarWinds Alerting Service V2

SolarWinds Administration Service

SolarWinds Information Service

SolarWinds Information Service V3

SolarWinds Orion Module Engine

Outbound

The port used for communication with the SQL Server Browser Service to determine how to communicate with certain non-standard SQL Server installations.

n/a

1801

TCP

MSMQ Bidirectional

MSMQ WCF binding

WCF

5671

TCP

RabbitMQ Bidirectional

For encrypted RabbitMQ messaging (AMQP/TLS) into the main polling engine from all Orion servers.

TLS 1.2

17777

TCP

SolarWinds Orion Module Engine

SolarWinds Information Service

SolarWinds Information Service V3

Bidirectional

Orion module traffic. Open the port to enable communication from your poller to the Orion Web Console, and from the Orion Web Console to your poller. Used for communication between services.

The port used for communication between the Orion Web Console and the poller.

Used for communication between the main server and pool members.

RSA handshake, AES 256 communication using WCF

17778

HTTPS

SolarWinds Agent Inbound to the Orion server

Required for access to the SWIS API and agent communication

SSL

Hardware requirements

The following table lists minimum hardware requirements and recommendations for your SolarWinds server on both physical and virtual computers.

Use the minimum hardware configuration if you are evaluating the product or do not anticipate heavy usage.

SolarWinds strongly suggests using the recommended hardware configuration to avoid potential performance issues caused by a heavy load or custom configurations such as increased data retention or more frequent polling intervals.

Installing multiple SolarWindsOrion Platform products on the same computer may change the requirements.

Hardware requirements are listed by SolarWinds NPM license level.

Hardware

SL100, SL250, SL500

SL2000

SLX

CPU

Quad core processor or better

Quad core processor or better

Quad core processor or better

Do not enable Physical Address Extension (PAE).

Hard drive space

10 GB minimum

20 GB recommended

15 GB minimum

40 GB recommended

30 GB minimum

40 GB recommended

Two 146 GB 15K (RAID 1/Mirrored Settings) hard drives are recommended with a dedicated drive for the server operating system and SolarWinds installation.

During upgrades, the installer needs 2 GB of free space.

Some common files may need to be installed on the same drive as your server operating system. You may want to move or expand the Windows temporary directories.

Memory

6 GB minimum

8 GB recommended

8 GB minimum

16 GB recommended

16 GB minimum

32 GB recommended

Database server (SQL Server) requirements

The Orion server and the SolarWinds Orion database must use separate servers.

If you install on a virtual machine, you must maintain your SQL Server database on a separate, physical drive.

The following table lists software and hardware requirements for your SolarWinds Orion database server using SolarWindsNPM license levels.

Requirements SL100, SL250, SL500 SL2000 SLX

SQL Server

SolarWinds supports Express, Standard, or Enterprise versions of the following:

  • SQL Server 2012
  • SQL Server 2012 SP1
  • SQL Server 2012 SP2
  • SQL Server 2012 SP3
  • SQL Server 2014
  • SQL Server 2014 SP1
  • SQL Server 2014 SP2
  • SQL Server 2014 SP3
  • SQL Server 2016
  • SQL Server 2016 SP1
  • SQL Server 2017 (including installations on Linux)

SolarWinds strongly recommends using the 64-bit version of SQL Server.

  • Due to latency effects, SolarWinds does not recommend installing your SQL Server and your Orion server or additional polling engine in different locations across a WAN. For more information, see Install SolarWinds software and SolarWinds database (SQL Server) across a WAN.
  • 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 volume you store your transaction log has free space that is at least equal to or greater than the size of your Orion database. Your transaction logs will continue to grow indefinitely until a database backup is performed and the transactions committed to the database. We recommend daily database backups when you use the Full Recovery model.
  • SolarWinds recommends Simple database recovery mode to ensure best performance.

SQL Server collation

  • 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

We support CI database on an CS SQL Server.

We do not support case-sensitive databases.

CPU

Quad core processor or better

Dual quad core processor or better

Dual quad core processor or better

Hard drive space

20 GB minimum

40 GB recommended

50 GB minimum

100 GB recommended

100 GB minimum

400 GB recommended

SolarWinds recommends the following 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 your 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 your 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 your tempdb data file
  • Disk Subsystem 6 Array 6: with 4x 15k 146 GB or 300 GB disks configured in a RAID 0 array for your tempdb log file
  • 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 operating system and tempdb files.
  • Other RAID configurations can negatively affect your SQL Server's performance.
  • Mirrored drives for the OS and RAID 1+0 for database data files are recommended.
  • Solid state drives (SSD) 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 the Windows or SQL temporary directories.

Memory

SL100

4 GB minimum

8 GB recommended

16 GB minimum

64 GB recommended

64 GB minimum

128 GB recommended

SL250 and SL500

8 GB minimum

16 GB recommended

Authentication

Either mixed-mode or Windows authentication. If you require SQL authentication, you must enable mixed mode on your SQL server.
Other software

If you are managing your SolarWinds Orion database, SolarWinds recommends you install the SQL Server Management Studio component.

The Installation Wizard installs the following required x86 components if they are not found on your Orion database server:

  • SQL Server System Common Language Runtime (CLR) Types. Orion 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