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.

Software requirements
Account privileges
Port requirements
Hardware requirements
Database requirements
Amazon Web Service requirements

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
CPU	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
Hard drive space	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)
SQL Server	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
Hard drive space	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