Compatibility matrix, operating system and hardware requirements, server sizing guide

Compatibility matrix (system requirements)

Server sizing

Minimum server specifications

To size your server

Server configuration components

Amending server configuration components

Server roles

Required server locale

Estimated bandwidth requirement

Entuity server sizing depends on different aspects of the monitored network environment. For example, device interface density, SNMP agent response times, network latency and other external factors will all affect the maximum number of devices a server can support. It is recommended that you seek advice from an Entuity technical representative when specifying your server configuration.

Compatibility matrix (system requirements):

Entuity is only certified for use with the 64-bit English edition variants of:

ENA v17.0:

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES version 6.
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES version 7.
• Oracle Linux 6.
• Oracle Linux 7.
• Windows Server 2012.
• Windows Server 2012 R2.
• Windows Server 2016.

ENA v18.0, Entuity v19.0 and Entuity v20.0:

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES version 7.
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES version 8.
• Oracle Linux 7.
• Oracle Linux 8.
• Windows Server 2016
• Windows Server 2019.

Entuity v21.0 and v22.0:

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES version 8.
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES version 9.
• Oracle Linux 8.
• Oracle Linux 9.
• Windows Server 2019.
• Windows Server 2022.

Server sizing:

You can install Entuity to both physical and virtual machines. The hardware requirements are the same for both.

The two key loading factors are the number of devices and the number of ports (i.e. physical and virtual interfaces). These are inversely related - the maximum number of devices that can be managed without affecting performance characteristics is inversely proportional to the total number of objects.

Estimate how many devices and ports you want the server to manage. You should only include to your estimate devices that you intend to SNMP poll (this is because Ping Only devices have a limited impact on server resources). Entuity uses ICMP to only poll their management IP addresses.

Minimum server specifications:

• Low: 400 devices and 25,000 ports.
• Intermediate: 800 devices and 50,000 ports.
• High: 1,000 devices and 70,000 ports.

For the purposes of server sizing, assets such as SD controllers, server devices and storage devices are all considered as devices. However, associated devices and any devices/platforms managed through a controller should be considered in the port count.

For example, if a Meraki controller has 20,000 end devices, those 20,000 end devices should be considered as 20,000 ports for the above calculations.

An exception to this occurs if you are directly managing these end devices/platforms through SNMP, in which case they would be counted as fully managed devices in their own right.

From Entuity v19.0 upwards, storage, server and OS polling and monitoring is supported. An Entuity server can handle up to 150 storage and/or server devices, due to the restrictions of the devices themselves within a 5 minute polling window. Therefore, using the above example of 1,000 devices and 70,000 ports, if you manage 150 server devices and/or storage devices, Entuity can still handle 850 other network devices.

For some storage devices, Entuity uses the manufacturer's applications to poll the devices (such as uemcli) which can consume significant CPU and therefore impact the overall capacity of Entuity to poll other devices.

To size your server:

1. Choose an operating system.
2. Choose the role of the server, eg:
   • a server acting as a Central License Server and not managing devices would have a low category server specification. A Central License Server allows you to control licensing of all your Entuity servers from one central server. This makes it very easy to move device licenses between servers when required.
   • a server acting as a Consolidation Server and not managing devices would have a low category server specification. In a multi-server environment, users can log on to an Entuity Consolidation Server to access information gathered and stored by multiple polling servers.
   • a server acting as a Polling Server faces the most significant loading factors as the number of devices and the number of ports. You can use the chart to identify the most suitable server configuration based on managed device and port numbers. If the server's role is to act additionally as a Central License Server, a Consolidation Server or a Flow Collector (as well as Polling Server), it is recommended that a faster processor clock speed (closer to 3GHz) is selected.
   • a server acting as a Flow Collection Server is accommodated within the recommended server configurations. If the server's only role is to act as a Flow Collector (without polling), you can identify the server configuration form the chart using a port count of zero.
3. Estimate how many devices and ports you want the server to manage. You should only include to your estimate devices which you intend to SNMP poll. Ping Only devices have a limited impact on server resources (Entuity uses ICMP to only poll their management IP addresses).
4. Apply these figures to the sizing chart above. The intersection determines within which device-port banding the server falls - low, intermediate or high.
5. See the below table for a by-component breakdown of the minimum requirements for each of the device-port management bands.

Please contact your Entuity representative for further help and information regards estimating server sizing. 

Server configuration components:

The relationship between Entuity server performance and the different components of the machine on which it is installed is critical when developing a machine specification. The key components are:

• CPU clock speed:
  • the time to process certain functions, e.g. to display a web page or generate reports, is governed by the speed of single-threaded operations. The faster the clock speed, the faster the single-threaded operations are processed. Therefore, server clock speed will most noticeably affect the responsiveness of the user interface. Entuity Support recommend that servers have a minimum clock speed of 2.5GHz, and ideally have speeds nearer 3GHz.
• Number of CPU cores:
  • this governs how many multi-threaded operations can take place simultaneously. Entuity's polling engine has a multi-threaded architecture, and therefore its polling capacity and data throughput increases with the number of available CPU cores. The relationship between polling capacity and cores is not linear - more cores have greater contention for shared system and application resources. Entuity Support has determined that there are only small improvements in performance by increasing beyond 16 cores.
• Memory:
  • it is important that the memory requirements of Entuity's running processes can be accommodated in physical memory. System performance is severely impacted when physical memory is exhausted and process memory allocations are paged to the disk. In addition, there are benefits to be gained by having extra spare memory, since this will be used by the operating system to cache disk information which can then improve database performance.
• Disk capacity:
  • minimum disk space requirements cover Entuity's installed software, its embedded database, and storage for standard usage of scheduled reports. Entuity Support recommends a SCSI Ultra 320 or SAS disk sub system for physical servers, preferably with separation of disk I/O generated by memory swapping from database traffic. Therefore, the operating system and swap partition should be located on one physical disk with Entuity including its database on another.
  • RAID 5 is not recommended, because physical disk synchronization issues seem to cause high latency. RAID 1 (mirroring) is acceptable, but must be a hardware implementation.
• Disk performance:
  • Entuity database relies on fast throughput of data to the storage system. Entuity Support recommends that systems are configured with the fastest storage system options available.
  • Entuity Support also recommends that SSD storage be used. If hard disks are employed, then the disk rotational speeds should be no slower than 15Krpm, and Input/Output Operations Per Second (IOPS) is rated at 150 or above.

Amending server configuration components:

When installing Entuity, it is essential to ensure that the server is sized correctly, and that the software is configured correctly to suit the server specifications. You will need to make configuration changes in order to match the software to the server specifications.

You can amend the default configuration of an Entuity server through entuity_home\etc\entuity.cfg. After amending entuity.cfg, you must first run configure.

Changing a setting without the appropriate hardware components can seriously impact server performance.

When the requirements of a server resource are:

• low, you should not have to amend the default configuration settings.
  
  
• intermediate, you could amend:
  
  [Database]
  key_buffer=1024M
  
  [MibServ]
  workers=40
  
  
• high, you could amend:
  
  
  • for Linux installs:
    
    [Database]
    key_buffer=3072M
    table_cache=3072
    
    
  • for Windows installs:
    
    [Database]
    key_buffer=1024M
    
    
  • for all operating systems:
    
    [DataStream]
    NumStreamInstTables=4
    NumSampleCaches=8!
    CacheStreams=100000
    
    [MibServ]
    workers=60
    
    [eyepoller]
    workers=50
    
    [eosserver]
    javaMemory=3072M

Server roles:

• Central License Server and not managing devices:
  • this has a low category server specification. A Central License Server allows you to control licensing of all Entuity servers from one central server. This makes it very easy to move device licenses between servers when required.
• Consolidation Server and not managing devices:
  • this has a low category server specification. In a multi-server environment, users can log on to an Entuity Consolidation Server to access information gathered and stored by multiple polling servers.
• Polling Server:
  • this faces the most significant loading factors through the number of devices and ports. Use the above chart to identify the most suitable server configuration, based on managed device and port numbers. If the server's role is to additionally act as a Central License Server, a Consolidation Server or a Flow Collection Server (as well as a Polling Server), it is recommended that a faster processor clock speed (closer to 3GHz) is selected.
• Flow Collection Server:
  • this is accommodated within the recommended server configurations. If the server's only role is to act as a Flow Collector (without polling), you can identify the server configuration from the chart by using a port count of zero.

Required server locale

When installing Entuity on a server, the server locale must be either American English or British English.

Estimated bandwidth requirement

Please see this article detailing how much bandwidth Entuity needs to support monitoring of network devices.