Solarwinds Scalability Engines
Plug-And-Play Enterprise Scalability

Orion Failover Engine:

Explore how the Orion Failover Engine (FoE) provides two-minute failover for your Orion management system to ensure you never lose network performance visibility.

Ensure 24x7 Availability for Your Orion Servers

Orion Failover Engine (FoE) monitors the health of your Orion server to ensure you never lose network performance visibility. If something should happen to your primary Orion server, Orion FoE automatically fails over to a remote server. The passive failover server assumes the full identity of the Orion server and assumes all monitoring, alerting, reporting, and data collection responsibility. Orion FoE's switchover is an automatic, seamless process that ensures Orion data collection continuity and is completely transparent to the user.

Afraid of the dark? We are. Network engineers around the world have grown to love the visibility Orion network management products deliver into their network’s performance. But what happens if your Orion server hits a snag? Failures can be caused by server hardware issues, operating system lock-ups, power outages, or even by network availability itself—and these issues are much more common than you think!

Managing a network in the dark is no fun. That’s why we’ve created the Orion Failover Engine (FoE) which monitors the health of your Orion server to ensure you never lose network performance visibility. If something should happen to your primary Orion server, Orion FoE automatically fails over to a remote server. The passive failover server assumes the full identity of the Orion server and assumes all monitoring, alerting, reporting, and data collection responsibility. Orion FoE’s switchover is an automatic, seamless process to ensure Orion data collection continuity and is completely transparent to the user. Orion FoE is an ideal disaster recovery solution for networks that demand high availability and performance.

Key Features:

• Provides two-minute failover for your business-critical network management system
• Delivers instant e-mail notification if key health thresholds for your network management system are crossed
• Supports the customization of failover rules which can trigger based on application, system, process, and service health thresholds
• Provides high availability and ensures business continuity with real-time monitoring of your Orion implementation (including Orion modules and polling engines)
• Saves time by automating failover tasks such as creating processes, restarting services, or updating DNS records
• Prevents downtime with almost instantaneous automated failover when component failures occur
• Minimizes WAN traffic during disaster recovery scenarios by leveraging WAN data compression optimization

Server Protection

Should the production server fail, Orion FoE protects the network identity of your production server ensuring that users are provided with a replica server including server name and IP address.

• Installed on a primary ("active") server and secondary ("passive") server
• Failover initiated when passive server detects that the monitoring process has failed
• Passive server immediately assumes the active server role

Application Protection

Orion FoE enables you to maintain your application environment by ensuring that network applications and services stay alive.

• Orion FoE on the active server uses plug-ins to monitor the applications and services it has been configured to protect
• If the protected app fails, Orion FoE attempts to restart the application on the active server
• Orion FoE initiates switchover if the restart fails

Network Protection

Orion FoE proactively monitors the network by polling up to three nodes to ensure that the active server is visible on the network.

• At regular intervals, polls defined nodes around the network including the default gateway, the primary DNS server, and the global catalog server
• Initiates a failover if all three nodes fail to respond, allowing the secondary server to assume a network identity identical to that of the primary server

Performance Protection

Orion FoE proactively monitors system performance attribute to ensure notification of problems to allow for preemptive action to prevent an outage.

• Monitors application attributes to ensure they remain within normal operating ranges
• Establishes rules to trigger specific corrective actions when these attributes fall outside their respective ranges

Data Protection

FoE intercepts all data written by users and applications and maintains a copy of this data on the passive server that can be used in the event of failure.

• Protects files, folders and registry settings on the active server by mirroring in real time to the passive server
• All protected files are available on the secondary server after a failover

Orion Additional Polling Engine:

Now you can distribute Orion network device polling across multiple servers. Learn how to add additional polling engines to your enterprise network monitoring environment.

Extended and Distributed Polling for Large Networks

Extend your monitoring with the addition of Additional Polling Engines and greatly expand the number of elements or applications that you can monitor. With Additional Polling Engines, you can distribute the polling load for your Orion platform* installation between multiple servers to provide scalability for large networks and reduce the impact on poller performance as a result of rapid growth within your virtual infrastructure.

Additional polling engines support Orion platform products which include: SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM), SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor (SAM), SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer (NTA), SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager (NCM), SolarWinds VoIP & Network Quality Manager (VNQM), SolarWinds User Device Tracker (UDT), and SolarWinds Web Performance Monitor (WPM).

Improve your network management coverage with the addition of Additional Polling Engines and greatly expand the number of elements or applications that you can monitor. With the addition of Additional Polling Engines, you can:

• Distribute the polling load for your Orion platform installation between multiple servers to provide scalability for large networks     
• Reduce the impact on your poller performance as a result of rapid growth within your virtualization infrastructure

Frequently Asked Questions

What products are included in the Orion Platform?

Orion Platform products include: SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM), SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer (NTA), SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager (NCM), SolarWinds User Device Tracker (UDT), SolarWinds VoIP & Network Quality Manager (VNQM), SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor (SAM), and SolarWinds Web Performance Monitor (WPM).

What products are supported by Additional Polling Engines?

Additional Polling Engines support the following Orion Platform products: SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM), SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer (NTA), SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager (NCM), SolarWinds User Device Tracker (UDT), SolarWinds VoIP & Network Quality Manager (VNQM), SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor (SAM), and SolarWinds Web Performance Monitor (WPM).

How are Additional Polling Engines licensed?

Additional polling engines are licensed based on the number of Orion Platform servers, physical or virtual, they are deployed on.

Example 1 – My Orion Platform products are installed on a single Orion core server.

This scenario will require a single Additional Polling Engine license and will support any Orion Platform products installed on your Orion Platform server.

Example 2 – My Orion Platform products are installed across multiple Orion Platform servers.

An Additional Polling Engine license for each Orion Platform server on which you need additional polling capacity will be required.

Do I have to install my Additional Polling Engine at the same location as my main polling engine and database?

You can install your Additional Polling Engine at the same location as your main polling engine and database or in a different location. There may, however, be a bandwidth impact of deploying Additional Polling Engines across a WAN.

What happens if my Additional Polling Engine loses the connection to the database?

SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM) includes the ability to locally cache up to one hour of data in case the Additional Polling Engine loses its connection with the database. This capability is currently available only on NPM.

Orion Web Server Engine:

Enable more users to access Orion while benefiting from increased scalability & deployment flexibility.

Enable More Users to Access Orion

By adding an additional web server, the Orion website can run on a different machine than the Orion server, enabling more users to access the Orion web portal without affecting performance and providing increased scalability and deployment flexibility.

Orion Web Server Engine Features:

• Enables more users to access the Orion web portal without performance degradation
• Increases scalability and provides flexibility in deploying Orion

System Requirements:

Hardware	Minimum Requirements
Memory	1GB (2GB recommended) in addition to any other memory requirements for the operating system or SolarWinds Orion modules.
Hard Drive	2GB of Available disk space in the installation drive
Software	Minimum Requirements
Operating System	Windows Server 2003 x86 Standard or Enterprise, SP1 and SP2, and x64 Enterprise SP2 Windows Server 2008 x86 or x64, SP1 and SP2, and R2
Supported Solarwinds Orion Modules	SolarWinds Orion Core Services 2010.0 Orion NPM v10.x Orion APM v3.0 Orion IPAM v1.6 Orion IPSLA Manager v 3.5 Orion NTA v3.6 Orion NCM v6.0 Orion EOC v1.2

Documentation:

Download the Solarwinds Orion Failover Engine Datasheet (.PDF)