question about running Nagios on Solaris LDom and Zone servers

[Scott, Ewan]

Matthew
Thanks for this. I am going to have to give consideration to exactly the same things you already have, so what you've written will be helpful.
Regards
Ewan

-----Original Message-----
From: Litwin, Matthew [mailto:mlitwin at stubhub.com] 
Sent: 12 January 2010 19:01
To: Scott, Ewan
Cc: Morris, Patrick; Nagios Mailinglist
Subject: Re: [Nagios-users] question about running Nagios on Solaris LDom and Zone servers

I am looking at the same situation myself and have decided that I am going to have to run NRPE on each zone lest I rewrite all my plugins. Now I am deciding which checks should run on the LDom and which on the zones. It seems that disk checks are are good first choice to run on the LDom only, especially since there are already plugins on Nagios Exchange to do this (check_zpools.sh and such). I am trying to figure out what would be the best way to just use the LDom for CPU and load checking, but I don't see any plugins that would be able to give zone specific results.

Aside from performance concerns, the main concern I am having is about how Nagios runs the checks and therefore how it organizes it. The whole LDom model breaks the Nagios host model of organazing things by host and in order to preserve this you pretty much have to make a new set of entries in command.cfg that can map your host names to zone names so that while you are running the commands against the LDom Nagios organizes the resultant data by the proper virtual host name and not just dump everything under the LDom host. This will be some work and will add yet another layer of complexity to an already complex system.

I am not sure if any of this will be helpful, but it sounds like are trying to do the same thing.

Here are some other resources that I stumbled upon so far which should be helpful as well:
https://s23.org/wiki/Nagios/checks/solaris_zones
http://stig.prod.dbs.melbourneit.com/

On Jan 12, 2010, at 2:41 AM, Scott, Ewan wrote:

> Thanks for this. I have not decided on exactly what I'll monitor as I'm still installing the clients and making sure the the basic infrastucture works. However in outline:
> 
> 1. I intend to use nrpe for the checks. 
> 2. I would envisage 5-6 basic checks on the host primary LDom servers (4) and primary Zone servers (2).
> 3. I would expect to run up to 10 nrpe checks on each of the guest LDoms and Zones (25 systems).
> 
> I would see that as a small system with lightweight checking but would appreciate comments if anyone thinks otherwise. 
> 
> Further down the line I'd like to add in 80+ Windows VM systems at which point it would become a very differnet  beast. Currently I'm running the Nagios server on Ubuntu on an old Dell PowerEdge 1850 but had thought of moving it over to a VMware virtual box as it grows. From what you are saying you think I'd run into problems with Nagios on a VM like this and I'd be better keeping it on an - adequately powered - standalone physical box?
> 
> Regards
> Ewan
> 
> Version info:
> Nagios core: 3.2
> Nagios plugins: 1.4.14
> Nagios nrpe: 2.12
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Morris, Patrick [mailto:patrick.morris at hp.com] 
> Sent: 11 January 2010 18:25
> To: Scott, Ewan
> Cc: Nagios Mailinglist
> Subject: Re: [Nagios-users] question about running Nagios on Solaris LDom and Zone servers
> 
> Scott, Ewan wrote:
>> 
>> I am about to put Nagios on both the primary LDom physical servers and 
>> all the virtual guest systems which run on them. Similarly I intend to 
>> run it on the primary host zone servers and the guest zones running on 
>> them.  Is anyone aware of any problems - performance issues? - which 
>> can result from this blanket approach?
>> 
> 
> Not enough information to say, but generally, yes, there are a lot of 
> issues that *could* result from doing things this way, but you haven't 
> provided enough information to guess whether that'll be an issue for you 
> or not.
> 
> Nagios can be resource intensive, but it's all dependent on what you're 
> doing with it (how many hosts, how many services, which version you're 
> running, etc.). There have also been a lot of timing issues reported 
> with running Nagios in a VM, though I don't know whether those apply to 
> Solaris guest zones.
> 
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Thanks,
Matthew Litwin
mlitwin at stubhub.com
415.222.8475


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