N-able Technologies provides two tiers of hardware support for on-premise N-central software – certified systems and compatible systems. The certified systems have been tested by N-able to ensure software compatibility as well as software performance. The compatible systems are supported for software installation and operation but have not been tested for performance and scalability. Download the system requirements.

N-central Probe

A probe is a component of the network monitoring system that resides within a customer's corporate network. Probes enable the product to monitor multiple private networks without compromising existing security measures, no matter what IP addressing scheme is used. Windows Probe: Software-based probe installed on a Windows device providing full monitoring and management of Windows and non-Windows devices.

Support for VMware Environments

N-able Technologies has added VMware ESX Server 3.5 and 4.0 to its list of N-central Certified Server Hardware. As such, N-able commits to providing support to customers running in these VMware environments in the same manner that we support other N-central certified hardware.

Important Notes

Because VMware by its nature provides an abstraction layer between the hardware and the operating system that permits the operation of multiple logical systems on one physical server unit, there are two important considerations that you must be aware of when using this deployment method.

System Performance

N-able maintains guidelines for configuring the VMware instance that N-central should run in (see Recommended Configuration below). These are designed to maximize performance and reliability as much as possible. It is impossible to guarantee the scalability or performance of any particular instance of N-central deployed in a virtual machine, due to these factors:

• Variability in field environments resulting from VMware server configurations
• The number of parallel virtual machines
• The performance of the underlying system

Supportability

N-able Technologies supports the N-central software deployed in VMware in the same way that we support N-central deployed in other environments. This support is limited to the components (software and operating system) shipped with N-central and does not include troubleshooting of VMware systems or performance issues related to environmental factors; these areas will be supported on a best-effort basis. In certain circumstances, particularly in the event of serious issues with performance, we might ask that you move the system to a known physical hardware deployment to aid in troubleshooting and resolution.

Recommended Configuration

VMware Server

• VMware ESX Server Version 3.5 / 4.0
• We recommend that N-central be assigned higher resource access priority than competing systems to ensure performance
• Memory on the host system should not be over provisioned. This causes disk based swapping which significantly reduces N-central system performance.
• The system must have sufficient RAM and hard drive space to provide permanently allocated resources as outlined below.

N-central Guest Configuration

• Guest Type: Typical
• Guest Operating System: Linux
• Version: RedHat Enterprise Linux 5 (64 bit)
• Number of Virtual Processors: 2 minimum
• Memory: 6,144MB (6 GB) minimum
• Network: 1 network interface card required
• Virtual Disk Capacity: 140 GB minimum