On 3 Mar 2014, at 13:30, Morten Brekkevold wrote:
So, a bit sorry for dragging up this old thread, but I figured it would be as good as starting a new one (-:
And sorry for the late reply!
No worries (-:
Are you working in an academic or enterprise setting? We'd love to have som feedback on your ongoing experience with NAV :)
Enterprise. I don't have any 'ongoing' experience with NAV, but when I get the time to set up NAV (around summer), I'll be sure to share my updated experience regarding NAV (-:
(I'll probably have shitloads of questions as well (-: ).
None of our customers monitor their WLC slave APs through NAV, just the wireless LAN controllers themselves. They prefer Cisco's own WLC-related software to monitor the slaves. Oftentimes, the slaves won't even have their own IP addresses.
Yeah, probably what we'll conclude with. In our case they have their own IP-addresses, so we could have NAV ping them, but again, that would probably cause a lot of noise, as there always are some access points going offline/online all over the place.
There should be no need to double the hardware, the resource requirement is not linear. The single most important thing you can do is have a dedicated PostgreSQL server, so that the database doesn't have to compete with the rest of NAV's processes for system resources. Throw lots of RAM at PostgreSQL, so that the most important bits can be kept cached at all times.
What is 'lots of RAM'? Are we talking ~32GB or ~128GB? :-P
Use reasonably modern hardware, fast disks (or even SSDs) and opt for RAID striping if you can (we use RAID 10 in production).
We'll probably use our VMware-environment. At least I think we'll start with that, to see how it copes with a virtualised environment. They just set up some new SAN solution that's supposedly pretty fast, so hopefully that'll do.
Do you have any indication as to what amount of storage is required? Both at the server running NAV, and the one running PostgreSQL? Probably depends on how long one wants to store things, but, yeah? At least some kind of indication of what sizes we're talking about? (I.e. 500GB vs. 2TB or whatnot?).
Also, unless you equip all your servers with SNMP agents that you wish NAV to monitor, they will not cause much load - NAV will just ping them (and monitor any services you explicitly configured it to).
Yes, this is what I suspected. _IF_ we decide to put in servers, it'll only be ping. However, we have a lot of change in servers being deleted/created (especially in our virtual environment), so we'd have to test out how much noise it would create.
Is there some kind of API in NAV, that could help manage the device database? I.e. some way that we could automate the list of servers NAV should ping by making a script or whatnot? Or maybe one can just interact directly with the PostgreSQL-database?
Not sure if the system load is very different depending on what NAV-features one wants to use? 'Arnold' and 'Syslog analyzer' are two things that comes to mind that we won't be using.
These aren't really resource-intensive. SNMP processing and data storage are what make up the bulk of NAV's resource usage.
OK.
Thanks for your feedback so far (-: