I’ve been thinking recently about complete stack monitoring and how a good solution should be like a teenager – it can primarily take care of itself, but occasionally needs to have someone step in and give it direction.
Challenge Accepted
The November Post-A-Day challenge (better known as #vDM30in30) has begun and I’m going to commit to making a post a day. I’ll be honest, I don’t know too much about the Virtual Design Management, but I do love a challenge – specifically this challenge.
How I Build an Orion Server
UPDATE: There’s an updated version of this post now available for scripters.
I’ve posted several times about how I personally build my SolarWinds Orion Servers. For this post, I’ll just discuss how I setup a Main Polling Engine on a Windows 2012 R2 Server.
SolarWinds Database on SQL Server for Linux
This post is some of my experiences with getting the SolarWinds Orion database running on a SQL Server hosted on a Linux-native system.
Amateur TV Repairs
As many of you know, the missus and I have recently moved. When we finally got the TV setup in the bedroom, we found an error on the screen.
Converting Linux VHD’s to VHDx
Virtual Hard Drives are the nuts and bolts of Virtualized Servers. This includes Linux Servers, but converting the hard drives provided some interesting findings.
After reading a bunch of the Microsoft documents about running Hyper-V for performance, there’s a big push to move all machines From Generation 1 to Generation 2 and Hard Drives to the VHDX Format.
Building My Orion Lab
So, I normally need to build a Lab for my SolarWinds Orion. If I’m doing this on my own machine and don’t have the luxury of a Windows Deployment Server (WDS), and I’ve built a custom hard drive for my Windows Servers, then I use a PowerShell script to do this work for me. (Seeing a pattern here?)
Creating a Windows Server Hard Drive “Template” for Hyper-V
This may not be the “official” way to create a template for Hyper-V according to Microsoft, but if you are running in an environment without SCCM or WDS (or on your personal machine), I’ve found that this process works very well.
This is fairly simple list of tasks, but it’s very long. Thankfully, you’ll only need to do this once and then you can re-use the image as many times as you like. I update mine once a quarter (to get the newest updates).
Tweak where it’s appropriate for your build.
