Orion Architecture

This blog recaps in relatively simple terms and diagrams, the basics of Orion’s architecture.

It is obviously not exhaustive in terms of the products and the deployment combinations, but it will hopefully give you the basic rules so you can easily derive and adapt them to your particular Orion deployment.

This blog is designed to help you getting rapidly familiar with most of the concepts and terminology but does not replace the architectural considerations described in each product’s user documentation set.

It is also a good set of pointers to many excellent blog postings that have been written in the past on all these products and components. Just follow the links…

The “*” in front of the names in the diagrams below, denotes commercial products. Boxes without “*” are modules that come with the Orion infrastructure and cannot be bought (e.g. Core).

I hope you’ll enjoy it and like always, post your comments and questions here, we’ll try to respond to them and improve this blog.

Basic software architecture

• Previous blog posts of interest: Orion NPM vNext Sign Up for Beta 3 & tell us what you think of improved Juniper support and many other features and improvements, Does your Service Provider deliver?, Data Aggregation and Summarization for NetFlow (NTA), NPM & APM Level 1 Customer Training
• Orion Core’s ability to handle dependencies and groups of managed elements in general and dynamic service groups in particular

Scalability: Growing an instance of Orion

• With the Additional Web server (more users)
• And the Additional Polling Engine (larger/more networks)

Scalability: Consolidating multiple instances of Orion

• EOC can be used for scalability or organizational needs (e.g. regional and national responsibilities; visualization offered at both levels)

Segmented deployments

• Avoiding VPN accesses with the Additional Web Server

Standalone products: APM, UDT, IPAM, NCM, SEUM

• With EOC providing a single pane of glass view
• NCM 7.0, 7.1, and 7.2 Architecture and Deployment
• Standalone vs. Module – What’s the difference and should I care?

Standalone products (shared DB server)

• It is possible to host several SQL Server databases on the same physical database server
• We do not support two instances of Orion products sharing the same database, but multiple Orion database can share the same SQL Server host if it is appropriately sized
• We recommend to run the DB Server on a physical server (not a VM)

Highly Available Architecture: Orion Fail Over Engine (Understanding the Orion Failover Engine Architecture) delivers several levels of protection

• Server and Application (shown below). Also Network, Performance, Data. See FOE’s User’s Documentation on this page
• FoE can protect the following components: Core, APM, EOC, IPAM, IP SLAM, NCM, NPM, NTA. NTA 4.x and FoE is addressed specifically here
• More on FoE: Orion Failover Engine Deployment Options and Q&A
• Upcoming Webcast - Creating High Availability and Fault Tolerant Environments using SolarWinds Failover Engine

MSP-type deployment

• Today, there are two recommended ways to deal with MSP-type deployments of Orion, where an MSP manages Customer networks that have potentially overlapping IP Addresses

NAT-based deployment: Network Address Translators translate the customer domain addresses, so that they are all unique from an Orion perspective

EOC-based deployment: a full instance of Orion is deployed per Customer and they are consolidated at the MSP level by EOC

• NAT-based deployment

NAT eliminates overlapping IP addresses

Makes identifications of managed devices more complex because the translated IP’s don’t make sense to report readers. This can be addressed by populating custom properties with IP’s or Names that will not be affected by any translation.

• EOC-based deployment

• More on MSP deployment in general and multi-tenancy in particular here