Forgive me if I am posting this in the wrong place; I just wanted to get someone’s opinion of my intended setup for LibreNMS and let me know tips, suggestions, and any other helpful advice.
I will be setting up LibreNMS on the following server:
HPE ProLiant DL360
128 GB RAM
24-core Xeon Silver 4516Y
8 x 1TB SSDs
My environment has roughly 700 devices that would be monitored.
I plan to utilize Proxmox to then create VMs which run the services which Libre NMS needs to operate (including LibreNMS itself).
Build-specific questions:
Are 8 x 1TB SSDs overkill? (Proxmox itself will be installed on the internal boot drive)
Should the SSDs be placed in RAID or mirrored? (I’ve heard benefits doing it both ways, which is why I’m asking about the specific use-case of LibreNMS).
Is ZFS recommended?
Libre-specific questions:
Is this server enough to deliver adequate monitoring performance?
Is it best practice to separate the database and/or RRD servers from the server that is running Libre?
How many polling servers would I benefit in setting up?
I am open to any and all other suggestions or advice this community may have.
Everyone’s opinion will be different but i’ll throw in my 2 cents.
128GB of RAM is plenty, even 32GB would do the job easily but will come down to how you have optimised mysql to how much of the memory is utilised.
24-core will be plenty. im running 16 cores with 450 devices, mostly switches with ports so my end can get rather heavy on resources but 16 cores is enough for my needs.
Storage wise LibreNMS really doesn’t store much at all, you can go 100GB just to be safe. im hardly using 10GB as is with my setup as is.
Polling servers imo depends on the locations of your devices. If your network is stretched accross the country or into other countries then you could setup additional pollers for each area. Honestly its something you can decide on later if you need and then build distributed pollers later on and its as simeple as a drop down box for devices which poller to point to.
I am glad you have provided insight on the poller inquiry. I am at a school district that isn’t really spread very far in terms of distance, so it sounds like a poller may not even be required. We’ve got about 12 buildings and only 2 of them are separated from the rest, about 3 miles away. I’ll do like you suggested and set it up without a poller at first, then go from there.
Most of our devices consist of cameras and APs. Across the district we have roughly 50-60 switches.
Sounds like I can get away with not installing all 8 of those SSDs. Maybe I’ll keep a few in reserve for backups.
The only reservation I’ve had about ZFS is that people say that it can cause SSDs to fail prematurely…Not sure about that one though. Maybe I’ll plan to go with it for now, especially since I’ll have backup SSDs.