ePO hardware requirements

[sethster]

We are purchasing ePO for an enviroment with approximately 6000 nodes. About 2,000 of those systems are in our HQ office and the rest are scattered around the country at about 40 sites.

I read the ePO walkthrough guide and spoke to the support at McAfee about hardware/software needs. From what I have gathered, I will be able to use the MSDE database without a problem.

Could anyone with a similar environment to mine give me a good idea of what kind of hardware I need? They say a Quad 500+. That seems like a huge server for what it is doing....

 

[AVChap]

It would seem a Quad 500+ is overkill. However, this is what the minimum specs are:

For ePolicy Orchestrator Server
Microsoft Windows NT or Windows 2000 server
Microsoft Internet Explorer v5 or later
4 GB HDD (the larger your organization, the more space you will need)
128 MB RAM (recommend 1 GB when managing more than 5000 agents)
CPU: Pentium II 400 MHz (recommend multiple processors when managing more than 5000 agents)
Reporting Database-up to 2 GB available with included Microsoft Data Engine. Expansion possible with Microsoft SQL 7.0.
Network interface card (NIC) which supports TCP/IP

Since you mentioned around 6000, probably a dual-P3 machine and 512MB RAM shoudl do the trick. BTW, a very large HD would help and it would also be better to use SQL7 instead of MSDE.

Hope this helps.

AVChap

 

[sethster]

Can you tell me why it would be better to use SQL 7 rather than MSDE. McAfee told me that MSDE will do just fine with the amount of nodes we have. None of the technical people there seemed to want to advise me on how many processors and that was why I asked on here.

I don't like to just go with the specs that the vendor suggests because they seem to always suggest resources way beyond the need of the product.

 

[darrnic]

We run ePO on a dual P3 with 512MB RAM for about 1000 nodes. We also run the database on SQL 7. My first configuration was a single P3 with 256MB RAM and running the LDAP database with ePO 1.0. When I upgraded to ePO 2.0, I noticed that there were several instances of 100% CPU utilization for several minutes at a time. Our polling interval is set to 60 minutes.

So I upgraded to two processors and upgraded the RAM also. The other step I took was to move the database from the ePO server to a separate SQL 7.0 server. That made a huge difference with the CPU utilization.

Our current configuration runs very nicely for the 1000 nodes. Our CPU utilization for each processor generally peaks at 50 to 60% now instead of 100%. We also use this server to house the DAT updates and send the DAT updates out to the branch servers.

So to tax the system six times what we currently are, I would definitely start at dual processors with 512MB of RAM and watch the CPU utilization and memory use. I would make sure the server has room for processor and memory expansion.

I would also recommend housing the database on a separate server preferrably SQL. The MSDE database works fine, but is housed on the same server. The ePO server will run more smoothly with the database located on a separate server. When I was running the database on the same ePO server, it seemed like the database would hang every few days, so I was rebooting the server about two times a week. Once I moved the database to a separate server, I no longer have to reboot the server. It has been running for almost a year without a reboot.

Since we already had an SQL 7.0 server, it was easy for the SQL admin to add the database to the server. Now the database is included in the nightly backup routine. I also backup the ePO server in case of system failure.

I hope this helps, but if you have any questions, please let me know. I am happy to help!

Mary Pierson
Network Analyst
mkpierson@cnasurety.com