Ad blocker detected: Our website is made possible by displaying online advertisements to our visitors. Please consider supporting us by disabling your ad blocker on our website.
We are wondering about installing cacti on a Virtual Machine. I've been searching for Operating System, memory, etc... requeriments, but I've found nothing about this issue in the documentation.
If you have a small installation, 1 to 20 devices, then a VM shouldn't be a problem. Where you run into problems is when you have a larger installation with a lot of RRDtool files. The update process of the RRDTool files requires a lot of Disk I/O. If you can't updated all the RRDTool files within the allowed polling interval (Default 5 Minutes) you will have issues.
[size=117][i][b]Tony Roman[/b][/i][/size]
[size=84][i]Experience is what causes a person to make new mistakes instead of old ones.[/i][/size]
[size=84][i]There are only 3 way to complete a project: Good, Fast or Cheap, pick two.[/i][/size]
[size=84][i]With age comes wisdom, what you choose to do with it determines whether or not you are wise.[/i][/size]
10 devices, plus the OS... You might be able to pull off 384MB, but I would suggest minimum 512MB.
[size=117][i][b]Tony Roman[/b][/i][/size]
[size=84][i]Experience is what causes a person to make new mistakes instead of old ones.[/i][/size]
[size=84][i]There are only 3 way to complete a project: Good, Fast or Cheap, pick two.[/i][/size]
[size=84][i]With age comes wisdom, what you choose to do with it determines whether or not you are wise.[/i][/size]
To be honest it will totally depend on what Virtual infrastructure you have. I only know from a VMware point of view but I have Cacti running on my laptop within VMware Workstation 6 and with 1 CPU, 512Mb, IDE Driver, I can easily monitor 10-15 devices.
However, I also manage a VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3 environment and because it is all connected to a Fibre Channel SAN I have no problems with Disk I/O. The virtual machine on VI3 is Windows 2000 Server, 1 CPU, 1024Mb, SCSI Driver.
Basically, I would suggest you would have no problems running Cacti within a production environment if you have a decent virtual server set-up. If you have some virtual software running on a 'normal' PC then keep the monitored devices <20.
pshankland wrote:To be honest it will totally depend on what Virtual infrastructure you have. I only know from a VMware point of view but I have Cacti running on my laptop within VMware Workstation 6 and with 1 CPU, 512Mb, IDE Driver, I can easily monitor 10-15 devices.
Cacti is mostly I/O and memory bound. I run Cacti inside of a VMWare ESX server, however, the cacti instance gets 24 gigs of ram, and writes to a 14 Drive 15k Speed (totals 1,200+ IOPS for write, 2,400+ for read) Fibre Channel SAN array.
Hey, throw enough hardware at it and it shouldn't matter..
It's all about cost/value.
[size=117][i][b]Tony Roman[/b][/i][/size]
[size=84][i]Experience is what causes a person to make new mistakes instead of old ones.[/i][/size]
[size=84][i]There are only 3 way to complete a project: Good, Fast or Cheap, pick two.[/i][/size]
[size=84][i]With age comes wisdom, what you choose to do with it determines whether or not you are wise.[/i][/size]
rcaston wrote:Cacti is mostly I/O and memory bound. I run Cacti inside of a VMWare ESX server, however, the cacti instance gets 24 gigs of ram, and writes to a 14 Drive 15k Speed (totals 1,200+ IOPS for write, 2,400+ for read) Fibre Channel SAN array.
Is your Cacti installation really that big that you are using 24Gb of RAM and 14 x drives?
My production Cacti box runs within a VM but on a physical IBM xSeries 3650 server with 2 x Intel Xeon 5160's and 24Gb of RAM BUT I also have about 8-10 other production VM's on the same hardware. I am only managing about 50 devices but getting no slow down and the other servers (production Lotus Domino boxes among others) don't get affected by the Cacti server.
Luar take a look at my hardware/software and also polling statistics in my signature. There are 3 other VM's running on that hardware. There was 4 but one got removed. I'm fairly happy with the speed of my set up. I know it could be quicker by adding more RAM, faster disks etc etc but the words finance industry and tight as a ducks arse go hand in hand!!! ;o)
I would recommend taking a look at the following post as its gives you an indication of poller speeds and what hardware/software people are using. There also some pointers on how to improve performance.
