hardware requirements?

[greymatter]

I have about 200 user's which means over 200+ devices that I'd like to montitor. I have 10 Wan locations. I want to run on a windows xp pro machine.

I do not want to purchase a server, but would like to use a mid-high end PC. What specs would I need to monitor these many devices? also, Would it be a better idea to have a separate box for each WAN monitoring each switch on-site and all its connected devices? Or would it be a better idea to do it from one Main location and monitor all bandwidth from there?

any experience or suggestions would be appreciated.

[rkramer]

first suggestion would be why use windows, linux is SO much better at doing this. not saying windows can't, it just has alot more overhead.

assuming plenty of bandwidth everywhere, minimal processor, fair amount of ram (1 or 2 gb), decent hard drive space. (more then 20 gigs, but that all depends on how many graphs and how long to store data)

[BSOD2600]

Why learn a new OS (linux) when he already knows Windows? It works just fine for monitoring a lot of hosts, especially when one uses Cactid.

You can see the old machine I'm using for my cacti installation. Although, I'm only monitoring about 14 devices. I suggest you have a modern P4 or AMD CPU (2+Ghz) so cactid has plenty to work with when launching several instances. As for memory, cacti doesn't take much besides the requirements for IIS and MySQL. I would only use one machine and monitor all remote locations from it. How laggy are your WAN links? If they're under ~250 ms, then you shouldn't have many problems.

[adrianmarsh]

I'm using a 1Ghz P3, 1Gb memory, 2000 server+mysql+php, monitoring around 20+devices, totalling around 1000 requests.

cactid takes about 30s average to run, and the server also acts as a www server for other iis sites (low usage though).

[TheWitness]

Both OS variants work just fine. Windows has some distinct advantages for anyone who is planning on monitoring servers especially Wintel servers.

If someone would ship me some Linux hardware I would use it too.

TheWitness

[boots]

Hey Greymatter,

No problems with using windows from my point of few.

To give you some idea, I'm pulling various stats from APC UPS's, Cisco VPN 30XX Concentrators, Cisco Routers 2600/3620, SAA from Cisco Routers, Netscreen Firewalls, Brocade Fibre Channel Switches, Extreme Switches and Windows Servers via SNMP Informant.

This totals around 115 hosts, running 4 threads and takes anywhere from 90 to 130 seconds on my 2003 server running under VMWare GSX and allocated 512M RAM. I'm starting to get to the point of moving this onto its own hardware so others can get some CPU back.

Cheers

Boots

[greymatter]

thanks for all the responses. it will help aid in my decision on which box to buy. although I am not using Cactid.. is this something that will cause latency throughout my WAN if I dont use it?

Hopefully everything should under 250ms. All of the WAN links are on PPP T1 connections.

[williem]

Hey,

One thing that i have not seen mentioned so far is that if you are going to be running this under XP-Pro, consider Apache for your web server instead of IIS. Apache does not have a 10 connection limit like IIS under XP-Pro. It works very well with Cacti. I use Apache for my testbed (which runs under XP Pro) and IIs for my production boxes (W2k3 server). My testbox monitors (when I am testing) the same 2000 hosts that my production box does. It is a 1.4ghz machine with 500 meg RAM. Using Cactid I can monitor my 2000 hosts in less than 200 sec. Take my production box 120 secs so CPU and Memory are not everything. Bandwith is equally important.

Regards,

Willie