System Center Operations Manager 2007: Networking

Nortel to Quadruple Network Speeds

Tue, 11 Mar 2008 23:26:51 GMT

http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9891249-7.html?tag=yt

Required Network Ports

Tue, 23 Oct 2007 17:22:00 GMT

Component A	Port/Direction	Component B	Configurable
Root Management Server	1433--->	Operational Database	Yes (Setup)
Management Server	1433--->	Operational Database	Yes (Setup)
Management Server	5723, 5724--->	Root Management Server	No
Gateway Server	5723, 5724--->	Root Management Server	No
Root Management Server	1433--->	Data Warehouse	No
Reporting Server	5723, 5724--->	Root Management Server	No
Operations Console	5724--->	Root Management Server	No
Connector Framework Source	51905 --->	Root Management Server	No
Web Console Server	5724 --->	Root Management Server	No
Root Management Server (Top-Tier)	5724 --->	Root Management Server (Mid-Tier)	No
Manual Agent	5723 --->	Root Management Server	Yes (Setup)
Manual Agent	5723 --->	Management Server	Yes (Setup)
Manual Agent	5723 --->	Gateway Server	Yes (Setup)
Gateway Server	5723 --->	Management Server	Yes (Setup)
Agent (Audit Collection Forwarder)	51909 --->	Management Server Audit Collector	Yes (Registry)
Agentless Exception Monitoring Data from client	51906 --->	Management Server Agentless Exception Monitoring File Share	Yes (AEM Wizard)
CEIP Data from client	51907 --->	Management Server CEIP End Point	Yes (AEM Wizard)
Operations Console (Reports)	80--->	SQL Reporting Services	No
Reporting Server	1433--->	Data Warehouse	Yes
Management Server Audit Collector	1433--->	Audit Collection Database	Yes
Web Console Browser	51908 --->	Web Console Server	Yes (IIS Admin)

Network Bandwidth Utilization for OpsMgr 2007 Roles

Tue, 23 Oct 2007 11:58:29 GMT

Courtesy of Satya Vel:

Agent to Root Management Servers\ Management Server (MS)\ Gateway Servers: The amount of data sent to MS is based on the kind of Management Packs (MPs) you have in your environment and how you as the end user have tuned these MPs. Some MPs by default send more data to MSs than others and to get an idea of what these MPs are you can view the table below. Data sent between agents and MSs is always compressed, in our test environment with the Active Directory, Base OS, DNS and OpsMgr MPs we noticed that the estimated bandwidth utilization was about 500 bytes per sec on a single agent and about 75 kilobytes per sec on server for 150 agents. We also did a test with all the MPs that are there out of the box and with an additional stress test MPs (simulating real world load) and we noticed that about 200Kbytes per sec received by a Management Server for 2000 agents. So as you can see from the numbers that the data sent between the agent and MS is compressed. The one common question that we get is the minimum bandwidth requirement for agent to MS in the supported configurations document is 64Kbps but my customer has a few servers that only have 56Kbps. Can we support this?. If your agent data packet size is small enough for the bandwidth you have then it should not be a problem. Our Microsoft product support folks (PSS) have always been very accommodating so while you maybe outside the support requirements they will not stop from helping you troubleshoot your issues. This is definitely one of the big perks of using Microsoft products and having Microsoft support. Gateway server are basically proxy agents that tunnel data from multiple agents to a Management Server. We have seen bandwidth utilization of about 22Kbytes per sec received by Gateway Servers for 400 agents with all the out of the box Management Packs and some stress Management Packs.
Root Management Server (RMS) \ Management Server(MS) to Database(DB) and Data Warehouse (DW):In OpsMgr 2007 the RMS and MS both write directly to the DB and DW. There is no DTS jobs like we had in MOM 2005. Since, the RMS and MS write directly to the DB and DW the data is not compressed and the size of data is larger as well. What we recommend many customers to do is to have their RMS\ MS close to the DB and DW and have fast links between them. It is much better to have the agents in remote geographic locations report to an MS than to have management server in remote geographic locations write to a DB and DW.
Audit Forwarders to Audit Collectors: While I am no expert in Audit Collection as a feature I will share with you the data we have collected for ACS so far. My colleague Joseph is the definitive ACS guru and should be the ultimate source of information on this topic. ACS forward events in near real time, rather than batching them together. This is different from how MOM2005 sends events. Therefore when we say ACS bandwidth utilization is 100 bytes per events and a system generates ~27 events/sec, you can literally translate that to 2.7KB per sec.

If there’s a loss of network connectivity, the forwarder will resend all security events that are not confirmed to be written to the DB by the collector. The forwarder sends a heartbeat (in the form of an event) to the collector every 45 seconds. If the collector does not receive the default of 3 heartbeats from the forwarder, the collector will drop the connection and the forwarder will automatically re-initiate the connection (if it is alive)

The size of a typical security event when it is being transmitted from the managed system to the ACS collector is usually less than 100 bytes. The size of a typical security event when it has been recorded in the ACS SQL database is less than 0.5KB. Typical CPU and memory utilization be for an agent assuming that ACS functionality is enabled also on the managed system CPU is typically is less than 1% and memory is about 4-6 MB.

Joseph in one of his mail threads to a OpsMgr discussion alias had written a quick and dirty script (rename it back to .vbs) that helps you count the number of events generated per sec on the local computer.

(It can run against remote computer, just supply the computer name as an argument, but it seems to be slow…) Run it like “CScript SecurityEventPerSecond.vbs >> NumOfEvtsGenPerSec.csv” and just load the csv in Excel to calculate the average. This can be useful in situation where it is not possible to install a pilot ACS collector in order to measure incoming event rate (by looking at the perf counter ACS Collector\Incoming Event per Sec)
NOTE: The script did not come through so please ping Satya Vel

Low-Bandwidth Scenarios

Tue, 23 Oct 2007 11:55:43 GMT

Courtesy of John Downing:

We have received a couple of customer inquires regarding the use of Operations Manger 2007 in a low-bandwidth scenario. These issues deal with a situation where the Management Server in one site (Site A) is separated from its agents in another site (Site B), and Sites A and B are separated by a low-bandwidth connection.

Operations Manager was designed and built to be an enterprise-wide solution. It was understood that this product would be expected to handle thousands of agents. Therefore all data going across the network between an agent and a Management Server or gateway server is not only encrypted, but compressed as well. Our compression ratio is in the range of 4:1 to 6:1.

The impact on the network between the two sites when using the Discovery Wizard to deploy an agent can be minimized by deploying a gateway server (GW) at the distant site (Site B). When an agent is deployed through a gateway server, the gateway server itself deploys the agent, not the Root Management Server (RMS). The Root Management Server issues the command to the gateway server to deploy the agent. I performed a test measuring network traffic between the RMS and GW and between the GW and the computer to which the agent was deployed. Network traffic between the RMS and GW was about 18KB. Network traffic between the GW and the computer receiving the agent was about 7.8MB. These figures include the initial three-way handshake and all Ethernet and TCP/IP headers. Because the gateway server performs the actual agent installation, the network hit between the RMS in Site A and the GW in Site B is minimal.

To further reduce network traffic, deploy only the Management Packs you need for the distant site. Consider creating a separate Management Group containing only the Management Packs you need.

Heartbeat settings are adjustable. You can set both the heartbeat interval and the number of missed heartbeats allowed. The default setting for the heartbeat interval is 60 seconds; the default setting for number of missed heartbeats allowed is 3.

Note that the figures given above for network traffic and compression ratios are for a typical installation and may differ depending on environmental variables.