Documentation forSolarWinds Platform

Orion Platform 2018.4 Requirements

Release Date: December 4, 2018

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 2018.4. 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 2018.4 Release Notes.

Software requirements

  • SolarWinds only supports installing the Orion agent on domain controllers. Do not install any other SolarWinds products on domain controllers.
  • SolarWinds only supports installing the Orion agent on the same server as a Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Exchange, or Research in Motion (RIM) Blackberry server. Sharing a database server with those applications is not supported.

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

Software Requirements
Operating system

End-of-support notice: Orion Platform 2018.4 products are no longer compatible with Windows Server 2012 and 2012 R2. To use the new features introduced in Orion Platform 2018.4, upgrade your
environment at your earliest convenience.

  • Windows Server 2019
  • Windows Server 2016

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.

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 the Anonymous Authentication is enabled for the SolarWinds NetPerfMon website. Anonymous Authentication is used with the default forms-based authentication.

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

.NET Framework

.NET 4.6.2 or later

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

Services

If you are using the Syslog or SNMP Traps feature of the Orion Platform, make sure the following services are running after installation is complete to collect Syslog messages and traps:

  • SolarWinds Syslog Service
  • SolarWinds Trap Service

Web console browser

Orion Platform products support two most recent versions of the following web browsers available at the release date:

  • Firefox
  • Chrome 

Orion Platform products also support the following browsers:

  • Microsoft Internet Explorer 11 with Active scripting

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

  • Microsoft Edge

Account privileges

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

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 Encryption

user defined, default: 22

SSH

SolarWinds Job Engine v2

IIS

Outbound from the Orion server to the device 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 Bidirectional 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 & 3DES encryption.

162

UDP

SolarWinds Trap Service Inbound

Receiving trap messages

n/a

443

TCP

IIS Inbound

Default port for https binding.

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 Communication between the SolarWinds server and 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 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. 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.

Sending messages to RabbitMQ.

TLS 1.2

17777

TCP

SolarWinds Orion Module Engine

SolarWinds Information Service

SolarWinds Information Service V3

SolarWinds Cortex

Bidirectional Communication between services and SolarWinds Orion module traffic.
Communication between the Orion Web Console and the polling engine.
Communication between the main server and pool members.

RSA handshake, AES 256 communication using WCF

TLS 1.2 with Cortex

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 physical computers, virtual computers, and cloud instances.

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

SolarWinds strongly recommends 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 Orion Platform products on the same computer may change the requirements.

Hardware requirements are listed by deployment size, based on the SolarWinds NPM license levels.

CPU recommendations for XL deployments use the PassMark Score. To learn more, see Pass Mark Performance Test (Copyright © 2018 PassMark® Software, obtained at https://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html on April 9, 2018).

Require-
ments

SMALL
SL100, SL250, SL500

Medium

SL2000

Large

SLX

XL (Up to 400,000 monitored elements)

CPU

Quad core processor or better

Quad core processor or better

Quad core processor or better

CPUs with a total combined PassMark score of 7,000 or higher

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

40 GB minimum

50 GB recommended

Read/Write I/O performance of 800 IOPS

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

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

16 GB minimum

32 GB recommended

Database server (SQL Server) requirements

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

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.

As of Orion Platform 2018.2, you can use Amazon RDS for SQL Server as your database server.

Require-
ments

 

Small

SL100, SL250, SL500

Medium

SL2000

Large

SLX

XL (up to 400,000 elements)

SQL Server

Express, Standard, or Enterprise versions of the following:

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

SolarWinds recommends that you use Express versions only for evaluations, very small environments, and EOC.

Enterprise versions of supported SQL Servers:

  • 2014
  • 2014 SP1
  • 2014 SP2
  • 2016
  • 2016 SP1
  • 2016 SP2
  • 2017 (including installations on Linux)

End-of-support notice: Orion Platform 2018.4 products are no longer
compatible with SQL Server 2012, 2012 SP1, 2012 SP2, 2012 SP3, and 2012 SP4. To
use the new features introduced in Orion Platform 2018.4, upgrade your
environment at your earliest convenience.

Recommendations

  • Use 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 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.
SQL Server collation
  • English with collation setting SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS
  • English with collation setting SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CS_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

CPUs with a total combined PassMark score of 32,000 or higher

Hard drive space

20 GB minimum

40 GB recommended

50 GB minimum

100 GB recommended

100 GB minimum

400 GB recommended*

500 GB minimum

1TB recommended

 

Read/Write I/O performance of 30,000 IOPs

190,000 IOPS or better recommended

1 Gbit dedicated NIC

 

  • 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

8 GB minimum

16 GB recommended

16 GB minimum

64 GB recommended

64 GB minimum

128 GB recommended

256 GB minimum

512 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

SolarWinds recommends you install the SQL Server Management Studio component on your Orion server.

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

* 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 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

Amazon Web Service (AWS deployments)

To deploy your Orion Platform using Amazon Web Service, consider using the following templates:

Require-
ments

Small

SL100, SL250, SL500

Medium

SL2000

Large

SLX

XL (up to 400,000 elements)

Orion Platform server

m4.large

m4.xlarge

Recommended: m5d.xlarge with SDD drive

m4.2xlarge

Recommended: m5d.2xlarge with SSD

m5.4xlarge

Recommended: m5d.2xlarge with SSD

SolarWinds Orion database server

r4.xlarge

r4.xlarge

r3.2xlarge

Recommended: r5d.xlarge with SSD

db.r4.8xlarge

Recommended: R5d.12xlarge

Amazon RDS db.r4.xlarge db.r4.2xlarge db.r4.4xlarge db.r4.8xlarge
Additional Polling Engines Only relevant for environments that monitor over 12,000 elements.

m5.xlarge