Network Management

Currently we're re-examining our virtual resource allocation to meet the increase in number of devices and I'm curious as to what others are doing. We have about 1000 devices and the plan is to remain virtual. I want everything to work but allocating 32 GB RAM, 685 GB of storage and upgrading the CPUs to i5-3570 may just be a tough bill to sell. We're also below the minimum for 1000 devices and notice discrepancies when AMON is enabled so we are working with TAC to work on those issues.

Are you using virtual server or dedicated appliance? In hindsight would you choose the other option?

Are you sizing for the minimum/recommended or lower? If virtual did you account for the 20% overhead?

Are you using AMON over SNMP and do you have any problems?

Thanksforyourtime.

I will chime in but let other customers reply with their experiences

1. With a device count of 1000, I would recommend the hardware route over the VM.  Airwave can be a resource hog but the top metric to really pay attention to is IO.  How fast is the VM in terms of disk writes and reads?  Also, in a VM, that metric is shared among other VMs as well if I understand it correctly.  

2. I would always prefer AMON over SNMP.  AMON is a much more efficient protocol for sending data to Airwave.  Of course the discrepencies will need to be ironed out

3. I have seen VMs sized below the recommendations.  It really depends on the type of devices and the number of clients.  However, see point #1.

We sized our Airwave server over a year and a half ago using physical hardware sizing guide.

Once the server came in, I changed geard and put in a hypervisor and have been running virtual.

24GB quad-Xeon-3.6GHz with 16GB and up to 4 CPU for Airwave and the remaining resources for running beta-tests (Airwave) and miscellaneous small linux-servers as needed.

So far I'm running pretty smoothly with 915 devices and just over 1000 clients. The only issue is where VisualRF needs a kick to get back to calculating heatmaps.

I'd stay with VM until I can't for some reason. The first time I go to upgrade and you can't un-upgrade be restoring a snapshot would make me regret going physical again.

--Matthew