Documentation forVirtualization Manager

Scale your VMAN appliance deployment

If you've integrated the VMAN appliance with an installation of VMAN in the SolarWinds Platform, you will only need to scale your VMAN appliance if you're still using VMAN Appliance polling for monitoring.

If you're not sure, find out which type of polling your VMAN environment is using and why it matters.

If you're using the VMAN appliance and have not integrated it with an installation of VMAN in the SolarWinds Platform, follow the instructions in this section.

Scaling your deployment of the VMAN appliance is different from scaling an installation of VMAN in the SolarWinds Platform. If you don't use VMAN appliance polling, see Scaling your VMAN Orion installation.

Before scaling, consider retiring the VMAN appliance and switching to VMAN Orion polling

As of VMAN 8.0, the VMAN appliance is no longer required, so if you're still using the appliance and running VMAN 8.0 or greater, the first thing to do is to consider retiring the appliance by switching to VMAN Orion polling. 

As of VMAN 8.5, the VMAN appliance has been deprecated. The appliance will no longer receive new feature updates and will eventually reach end of support.

By retiring the appliance, you'll no longer need to maintain separate appliance and Orion servers in order to use all of the latest VMAN features like Recommendations. If you do retire the appliance and switch to VMAN Orion polling, you'll scale VMAN in the SolarWinds Platform.

However, if you're not ready to retire the appliance, you can still scale your appliance environment.

Not sure if you're ready to retire the appliance and move fully over to the SolarWinds Platform? See this post on THWACK to see a breakdown of features available in VMAN as part of the SolarWinds Platform.

When you scale your VMAN appliance deployment, you'll do two things:

Increase the system specifications of the main VMAN appliance server

As your VMAN environment grows, the load on your main server increases. Adding federated collectors to your deployment will help handle the increased monitoring load, but that monitored information still needs to be processed by your main VMAN appliance server.

To help your VMAN appliance server keep up with the additional processing load, you should upgrade it as your environment grows. In general, your main VMAN appliance should:

Federated collectors

Federated collectors are additional servers that you can set up with the specific purpose of helping to distribute and balance the workload of VMAN appliance-based data collection used for VM monitoring.

As your environment grows, install federated collectors to scale your VMAN appliance-based deployment to keep up with your VM load.

When to add a federated collector to your VMAN appliance environment

SolarWinds recommends adding a federated collector to your deployment for every 3,000 virtual machines in your environment.

So if you have around 9,000 virtual machines, SolarWinds recommends having at least two federated collectors (for a total of three servers, including the main VMAN appliance - or a total of four servers, if you have also integrated the VMAN appliance with an Orion server) to balance the polling load.

You can set up as many federated collectors as you need without the need for additional licenses.

How to install a federated collector

Installing a federated collector is similar to installing the main VMAN appliance, but instead of the main VMAN appliance installer package, you'll use a federated collector package included in the Customer Portal downloads section. Federated collectors are also installed as virtual appliances.

Federated collectors should meet the basic requirements for the VMAN appliance.

There are two federated collector packages available for download after you've logged into the Customer Portal:

  • Federated Data Collector Virtual Appliance for Hyper-V
  • Federated Data Collector Virtual Appliance for vSphere 5 and higher

You can find detailed instructions for installing a federated collector in the 7.1 VMAN Administrator Guide. See the section "Use federated collectors in Virtualization Manager".