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Recommended Best Practices
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Recommended Best Practices

Owned by Uday Dubey (Deactivated)
Jan 19, 2023

In ideal cases, the appliance that is designated as the Operations Center should be installed first, as described in Installing the Operations Center Software. Then, install the NetMRI virtual machines to act as collectors using the standard installation procedures described in Configuring and Registering NetMRI Collectors.
Configuring a VMware server and the virtual appliances that run on it is beyond the scope of this document. The following items outline best practices that have been found specific to NetMRI Virtual appliance installations.

AMD and Intel ProcessorsIssue: Hardware platforms using AMD processors may present performance bottlenecks to VMware
running NetMRI, in certain cases.
Recommendation: Avoid AMD processor hardware if possible. If this is not feasible, pay close attention
to the results of the platform benchmark and resolve any issues before installing NetMRI.
Issue: NetMRI benefits from hardware virtualization support included in the latest generation of Intel
processors. The performance of older generations of processors may not be suitable for high-performance
applications, such as high license count deployments.
Recommendation: Infoblox recommends running NetMRI on the latest generation of processors having
hardware virtualization support. Intel i7 based servers are shown to be particularly effective.
Disk PerformanceIssue: In high-performance applications, such as high license count deployments, NetMRI is
I/O-intensive. If multiple applications are configured to be accessing the same physical disk, NetMRI
can experience significant read/write delays that degrade its performance.
Recommendation: Infoblox recommends that NetMRI be provisioned to use dedicated disks/spindles.
Server Performance MonitoringIssue: NetMRI is a high-performance network analysis system. It may use CPUs intensely for extended
periods and may exceed CPU thresholds currently set on server performance monitoring applications.
Recommendation: If monitoring is set up for your VMware server, you need to raise or eliminate the
alert threshold values for NetMRI to eliminate unnecessary alarms.
CPU AllocationIssue: Due to context-switching overhead, allocating more vCPUs to NetMRI may, in fact, impair
performance.
Recommendation: Infoblox recommends adherence to the recommended vCPU allocation parameters
listed on this page. If the system performance is suffering, check the CPU
Ready State times. If times are high, try reducing the number of vCPUs and see if that helps. If times
are low, try increasing vCPUs. Additional information relative to vCPU allocation can be found at:
http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vi_performance_tuning.pdf.

Connecting NetMRI to the Network (Hardware Appliances Only)

Note

This section applies only to Infoblox NetMRI hardware appliances.

NetMRI appliance communications require only an Ethernet connection. Follow these steps to connect NetMRI to your network:

 1. For NetMRI-1102-A, do one of the following:

  • To configure the appliance to use one port (same port for both system administration and network analysis), use a straight-through RJ45 Ethernet cable to connect from the MGMT Ethernet connector on the back panel of the NetMRI appliance to an available Ethernet connection on your network. The LAN1 port is enabled by default to carry both management and analysis traffic.
  • To configure the appliance to use two ports (one for system administration and one for network analysis), use straight-through RJ45 Ethernet cables to connect from the MGMT Ethernet connector on the back panel to the management network and connect from the SCAN Ethernet connector on the back panel to an Ethernet connection on the network to be analyzed by NetMRI. 

Note

All NetMRI appliance models support 10/100/1000Mbps network connections.

 2. For NT-4000, do one of the following:

  • To configure the appliance to use one port, use a straight-through RJ45 Ethernet cable to connect from the LAN1 Ethernet connector on the back panel of the NetMRI appliance to an Ethernet connection on the network. The LAN1 port is enabled by default to carry both management and analysis traffic.
  • To configure the appliance to use two ports (one for system administration and one for network analysis), use straight-through RJ45 Ethernet cables to connect from the LAN1 Ethernet connector on the back panel to the management network and from the LAN2 Ethernet connector on the back panel to an Ethernet connection on the network to be analyzed by NetMRI. The LAN2 port is disabled by default and must be enabled through the NetMRI UI after the initial setup of the appliance. Once enabled, LAN2 is designated as the analysis port.

 3. Plug NetMRI into an AC power source.

 4. Verify that the green Link LED on NetMRI’s RJ45 port is lit, indicating a good connection to your network. If possible, verify that the link indicator is lit on the network hub or switch port to which NetMRI is connected.         

Note

For a successful configuration process, NetMRI and the workstation used during setup must be connected to the same subnet or VLAN.

Configuring the UI Client

NetMRI always listens on the private IP address 169.254.1.1, subnet mask 255.255.255.0, which can be used at any time to configure NetMRI using the following procedure. The easiest way to access NetMRI on that address is to temporarily configure the workstation to use address 169.254.1.5, subnet mask 255.255.255.0.

The process for Windows 10 is described here, but it may be slightly different for other versions of Windows or other operating systems:

  1. In the search box next to Start , enter control panel and then select Control Panel from the list of results.
  2. In the Control Panel dialog box, click Network and Internet.
  3. In the Network and Internet dialog box, click Network and Sharing Center.
  4. In the Network and Sharing Center dialog box, click Local Area Connection.
  5. In the Local Area Connection Status dialog box, click Properties.
  6. In the Local Area Connection Properties dialog box, click Internet Protocol Version 4 (TCP/IP IPv4) and then click the Properties button.
  7. In the Internet Protocol Version 4 (TCP/IP IPv4) Properties dialog box, do the following:
    1. In the IP address field, enter 169.254.1.5.
    2. In the Subnet mask field, enter 255.255.255.0.
    3. Click OK.
  8. In the Local Area Connection Properties dialog box, click Close.
  9. For some versions of Windows, you might need to reboot your computer.
  10. Access NetMRI at 169.254.1.1 using SSH and then log in with the following credentials:
    • Username: admin
    • Password: admin
  11. To continue the installation, follow the instructions in Configuring NetMRI. 

Note

This address change is only necessary for the initial setup of NetMRI. Once setup is complete, return your workstation to its prior configuration.