Guidance on what hardware you use in production?

[dfmco]

We are currently starting a refresh cycle to get some of our older machines updated and wanted to know what others use in the field. Our current replacement is the following:

Supermicro Superserver E300-9D-8CN8TP with Intel Xeon D-2146NT
16GB RAM
250GB M.2 SSD
VMware 7
VMware installed on 32GB SATADOM SSD

Virtual has 8GB RAM with 4 CPU.
CentOS 8 OS is the base install
Nagios is installed from RPM to allow for automation
We use RAMdisk but wondering if that is still necessary since we moved to NVMe.

average install is 150-200 host checks and 1000-1500 service checks of mostly routers and switches. Each check of an interface has a bandwidth graph with it which adds more overhead. backups on some of the older installs are reaching about a gig in size.

As we have been upgrading Nagios over the years we are running into more and more load issues and we would like to make sure that we are not undersizing the installations now. I would love to know what others are using hardware wise and how Nagios is preforming for you.

I would prefer to keep server costs down as each client has his own install and offloading the db would not be worth it cost-wise. I would much rather throw more memory and/cpu at the individual boxes. A CPU upgrade will require a different model of server so I want to make sure that it is necessary if we go that route as the cost nearly doubles by going with a larger box with a replaceable CPU.

Thoughts?

[vtrac]

Hi,
Hope that your day is going well ...

Here's the page I found for Nagios XI Hardware Requirements:
https://assets.nagios.com/downloads/nag ... ements.pdf

As to using CentOS 8.
The CentOS 8 life cycle has been cut short with the news of its EOL in December 2021.

While CentOS 8 EOL is scheduled for 2021, CentOS 7 will be supported until 2024.
Therefore, if you haven’t gotten the chance to upgrade your CentOS 7 servers, don’t bother doing so.

I would recommend CentOS 7.9 or RHEL 7 / 8.


Best Regards,
Vinh

[dflick]

We were going to migrate to Rocky when available as the open source copy of RH8.

What are your thoughts on CPU class and memory type and does disk access play any part in CPU or memory load? We were using 4 core XEONs but since upgraded to Xeon D-2146NT 8-Core Processors. All of this is run on ESXi so I was not sure how much of a penalty we incur with the hardware requirements you sent.

Also, any thoughts in relation to RAMDISK vs NVMe? It is still worth setting up a RAMDISK if storage is on NVMe?

[vtrac]

Hi,
Since you are using NVMe, I don't think there is a need to setup RAMDISK (this is just my opinion).

As to hardware requirements, the table provides hardware recommendations based on a node (host) to service ratio.

As a support personnel, that is the only hardware recommendations info I got.

I would also suggest that you check with your company IT team and see what their opinions / advices are based on your current usages.


Best Regards,
Vinh