New to NWorks

[sameerdave]

Hello to all,

We are planning to deploy the NWorks MP in our SCOM environment. And I was just browsing to see if there were any best practices for the deployment and to see as what kind of common issues people are facing which could be corrected before the deployment.
Unfortunately I read a couple of posts, and saw that every time someone had a issue, it was dealt on by email support.

My first question I was looking for, that do we deploy nworks on a management server/rms or we need a separate server for this?
Is there any document as what describes as best practices?
Is this the only MP, or there have been updates on this MP like hotfixes or anything that needs to be installed once the MP is deployed?

yes, I haven't read the guides yet, and they would be helpful..

Thanks

[sameerdave]

just to add to it..
I think that latest version is 5.0. are there any hotfixes needed before the install?
I saw one post, where it was recommended to apply a MSFT hotfix for an issue. We are using win2k3 x64 and SCOM SP1

[Alec King]

Hi sameerdave,

We usually don't recommend sharing the nworks Collector with another application - such as SCOM MS/RMS...but it does depend on how large the VMware environment you are monitoring is. How many Hosts/VMs/Datastores do you have?
Best practice is to have the nworks Collector on a dedicated machine (which can be a VM) - however the nworks Management Center and web UI can be installed on the SCOM MS/RMS. Those components dont have such a high demand on cpu/memory as the Collector.

There is only one hotfix recommended in our Install Guide - it is a Microsoft .Net hotfix http://support.microsoft.com/kb/968760
We have only seen issues in SCOM R2 - you have SCOM SP1 - but in any case you may wish to include this hotfix in your build. Anyway it will prepare you for upgrade to SCOM R2 whenever you plan that

And I definitely recommend you read the documentation especially the Install Guide - there are a number of pre-requisites including changes to some default SCOM rules, registry changes on the Agent where the Collector is running, and so on.

Hope that answers your question! Any further queries please let me know,

Cheers

[sameerdave]

Thanks Alec King for your response and explanation. I really appreciate it.

So as i understand, we can have the collector on a VM. while we can install the Management Center and web UI on any of our management servers.. can you please let me know as to what would be a good configuration for the collector?

We currently have around 26 hosts and 230 VM's.. 8 clusters and 135 data stores. This is from one domain only.

[Vitaliy S.]

Hello Dave,

Yes, you can install a collector service to a dedicated machine (VM), as for the Management Center and web UI you can install it on any of your management servers, this should be working fine for you. But be aware, that you cannot install Management Center on your vCenter machine due to ports restrictions on web server for vCenter and MC server.
And don't forget to apply all overrides for SCOM agent as well as install SCOM hotfix on your VEM server as it is written in our Guides, during the installation process.

Thank you

[sameerdave]

Thanks guys for the information.
Is there a specific reason that we need to have a separate collector server? Can we not use one of the audit collection server which are less utilized for the collection service?

Or can we have all - collector service, management center and webUI on one physical box instead?

Thanks
Sameer

[sameerdave]

or all collector service, management center and webui on a VM?

[Vitaliy S.]

Hello Sameer,

Surely, you can install all the nworks components (Collector service, Management Center and webUI) on one single box: either physical box or a single VM. As Alec have already said we recommend to install collector service on a dedicated machine, as collector has higher demand on the cpu/memory (hardware specifications depend on the amount of total virtual objects you want to monitor) comparing to Management Center and the best practise is to use a dedicated machine for that, however you can share Collector with other applications.

Please have a look at our system requirements for VEM server (Collector server):

Memory: determined by a base amount plus 50 MB per managed ESX host 1024Mb + (50Mb * # ESX hosts).
Processor: 2 x 2GHz CPU recommended

Also please be aware that the number of the Collector services (as well as SCOM/MOM agents) depends on the virtual infrastructure you want to monitor, so as your infrastrucutre grows you may need more collectors (SCOM/MOM agents) to install.

Thank you.

[sameerdave]

Thanks for your quick response..