Nagios: Sun T2000 vs. Dell PowerEdge 2950

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Hey web,

I am doing a Nagios deployment. I need to decide on hardware, but I can’t. In short, do I run Nagios on a Sun T2000 or a Dell PowerEdge 2950?

It’d be Nagios 2.9, with about 30,000 services monitored (500 hosts * 60 service checks).

The T2000 would be something like eight 1 GHz cores (32 “CoolThreads”), 8 GB RAM, etc. with Solaris 10. The 2950 would be something like dual quad-core Intel X5355s, 8 GB RAM, etc. with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.

Is there anybody out there that has anything to  say either way about this? The only information I can find about Nagios on a T2000 is an old white paper about OpsWare, and they conclude that the app isn’t multithreaded enough to take advantage of it.

I’d really appreciate any advice. Thanks!

…Bob

4 thoughts on “Nagios: Sun T2000 vs. Dell PowerEdge 2950”

  1. Hey Sysadmin!

    Not an expert, but the only time I used one of those cool threads I tried compiling something on that (make -j 20) and it wasn’t that impressive to me. It could be other problems like disk speed, etc. But that’s just what I observed. You have used these machines before, Didn’t you? what do you think of them in general?

  2. We have nagios on a T2000, and I haven’t been able to convince nagios to stop being so polite and refuse to use more than one CPU.

  3. We are running nagios 2.9 on a T2000. It took a bit of redoing our RRD collection stuff, but we are very happy with it. While nagios is rather single threaded, all of the check processes that are spawning are utilizing the 32 threads very well. We see around 70-100 processes a second. The nagios box comes in very handy on checks that measure response time. Since they (threads) are shielded from hurting eachother, the responses are more true than say a really fast 2 or 4 core CPU can put out (there is a good bit of deviation when you have dozens of processes fighting over a single core thread).

  4. David, is it possible for you to send me your nagios.cfg (of the T2000). I’m facing the same problem.. can’t get more than 20 simultan. processes. Id like to get 200 hundred if its possible 😉

    Im runing on a T1000 6 cores 1.0Ghz.

    Thanks in advance

    Regards

    Rafael Tinoco

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