Medium customer network

This customer is a company with a central major data center and connections to several remote sites. The purpose of this installation is to manage this customer network by alerting the operations staff to major failures.

The following sections describe this network in greater detail and provide suggestions for a Network Manager deployment to meet the needs of this network.

Description

This network has between 250 and 5,000 network devices and key servers of interest. Workstations, while numbering in the thousands, are not managed. Network devices come from multiple vendors. All devices in the central location have Fast Ethernet or Gigabit Ethernet connections. Remote sites are connected by WAN connections. The devices and servers to be managed are distributed among the central and remote sites.

Within this environment the following example conditions apply:

  • There are 5 to 20 active GUI clients.
  • Chassis ping polling at two to five-minute intervals. SNMP polling at five to 15-minute intervals.
  • Other major Tivoli® products integrated with the system, other than the required Tivoli Netcool/OMNIbus.

Network Manager deployment

Each customer environment with this kind of network is different. The key to success is adequate memory and a careful understanding of the polling targets, combined polling rates, and the event rates. The following deployment settings are appropriate for this type of environment.
  • One or more network domains are required, depending on the size of network.
  • Single server deployment (up to 250 network devices and 5 to 10 concurrent users).
    • Four processors.
    • Up to 32 GB of memory.
    • Multiple physical disks in RAID 5 configuration.
  • Two-server deployment (up to 5,000 network devices and 10 to 20 concurrent users).
    • Four processors for system with Network Manager.
    • Four processors for system with Tivoli Netcool/OMNIbus and Dashboard Application Services Hub.
    • Up to 32 GB of memory for each server.
    • Multiple physical disks in RAID 5 configuration.
  • System may be any of the supported platforms.
  • Client system: single processor, 4 GB of memory, supported JRE and Internet browser
  • Db2® or Oracle RDBMS used for the NCIM database on server with 4 processors and 32Gb RAM.
  • Number of polling engines:
    • Single-server deployment: 1
    • Two-server deployment: One poller for chassis pings, one or more pollers for SNMP polls.
  • IPv6 dual stack support is required if workstations or network devices have IPv6.