Cacti Hardware Sizing for monitoring 700 Nodes

[dprodrig]

Hi,

I´m going to implement Cacti for monitoring 700 Nodes, with the following points:

- IP SLA
- QoS
- Interfaces

And I want to know:

- What type of processor do I need, Intel o AMD ?
- Could be 64 bits processor ?
- How many RAM ?
- How many storage space ?

Thanks in advance for the help.

Regards

Daniel

[rony]

- What type of processor do I need, Intel o AMD ?

Never a question of which, but how many cores. I would suggest between 4 to 8 cores.

- Could be 64 bits processor ?

YES!

- How many RAM ?

The more the better, because what you are going to encounter more than anything is the need for disk IO. Having more RAM will allow the OS to have a larger disk cache.

- How many storage space ?

Not as much as you think. What you need to concern yourself with is how much disk IO you can provide. A typical large Cacti system I will setup with 4 drive in a RAID10 to get redundancy and more spindles involved. Hardware raid or software raid, it doesn't matter.

But, you can mitigate a good amount of your disk IO requirements by including the Plugin Architecture and using the Boost Plugin.

Hope this helps.

[dprodrig]

Thanks a lot for you help !

Other question.

What is the best version of RedHat or CentOS that you recommend for cacti installation ?

Regards

Daniel

[rony]

The latest...

[dprodrig]

Can cacti run on a ESXi VMWare with the following specifications ?

- Centos 5.5
- 12 GB en RAM
- 2 AMD Opteron six cores processors
- 500 GB for storage

I hope that those resources can give us the best performance like a physical box with similar resources.

Because we are looking for a virtualization environments.

Thanks in advance again.

Regards.

Daniel.

[Alice]

How many nodes is not that important. The number of datasources is. Also, the required polling interval it's a very important factor.
I monitor about 900 devices, 26.000 DS, 21.000 graphs with a dual processor Xeon 5060 (dual-core with HT) & 3GB ram. The RAM usage is about 1-1.5GB (MySQL included), the polling time is about 20 seconds and the average CPU usage is about 17%.

[rony]

Can cacti run on a ESXi VMWare with the following specifications ?

- Centos 5.5
- 12 GB en RAM
- 2 AMD Opteron six cores processors
- 500 GB for storage

I hope that those resources can give us the best performance like a physical box with similar resources.

Because we are looking for a virtualization environments.

Thanks in advance again.

Regards.

Daniel.

Again, as long as you can provide the disk IO, you should be fine.

[gandalf]

Since some weeks, we're running a quite decend installation on a RHEL5 XEN virtualized system. While polling time did not decrease as intended, I must admit, that this is mostly script dependant. We do use BOOST as previously on a non-virtualized system. But since we're now using a quite powerful SAN, IOWait has dropped to nearly nothing.
R.