Heavy Cacti Hardware Requirements

[GarrettVW]

I've been tasked with having to figure out some requirements for hardware to run a Cacti server monitoring nearly 2,000 devices (people's home computers).
Specifically their SMs. But yeah, really appreciate any and all assistance with recommendations on what will be plenty of power to efficiently handle that kind of a load.

[phalek]

How many data points will each of these devices have ?

eg a switch with 48 ports will have more data points than a simple computer.

also what kind of protocol will you be using (SNMP, SSH, http... )

[GarrettVW]

I'm monitoring 2000 Cambium SMs that use SNMP and there's 5 queries per SM.
So that would total 10,000 queries every 5 minutes. I would also like to accomplish this in a VMware environment.

[IowaTechguy]

Forgive this slight hijack , but I have a similar interest in an already functioning Cacti server which I have inherited from a guy who has left our network. It appears if we put too many devices online we lose some data (the graphs become incomplete) and we monitor ~ 1000 endpoints.

Cacti 0.8.7b, strictly monitoring Bytes in/out
P4/Xeon 2.40GHz w/2GB RAM; has 10/100/1000 NIC card
Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES release 4 (Nahant Update 6)