Prime 1.3 Numerous Issues

chris.brunt · ‎10-28-2014

We are having some issues with Prime 1.3.

We need some advice and tuning, a backup and rebuild/restore has not addressed these issues.

Specifically -

System resource usage. The server uses 100% of all four 2.6/3ghz turbo CPUs every 15 mins and runs unusably slow during this time. I can see various background tasks running at this time, but it does not appear to be getting stuck on one in particular.
Disk Space usage. Since upgrading from WCS which had an 80gb drive, we now have 250gb and it's constantly running out of disk space, despite doing cleans and reducing data retention periods which we didn't want to have to do.
Errors on a lot of pages. E.g. "There was an error while parsing and rendering the content. (undefined is not a function)" when you search for a client. But this works in Firefox and was previously working ok in Chrome.

Our System specs are
Vmware ESX 5.1

Running on a HP BL460c Gen 8 Blade Xeon e5-2670 (16x 2.6ghz)

4x vCPU

12GB ram

1x 250GB Disk (on Teir 1 fibre channel attached SAN, I could not tell you the IOPS)

1260 Access Points

Approx 3000 Clients and rising on an average day

27 controllers on 7.x code

1 MSE 3350

No switches/routers/autonomous APs or any other devices on Prime at present (due to a lack of licences).

To be honest the Prime VM has more than twice the resources of the Cisco WCS server it replaced and runs much slower and is more unreliable. We are not particularly happy with it at present. The disk space is an issue for us at the moment as we don't have a lot free on our SAN.

I have not gone to 2.x yet as i'm waiting for a release to bring it in parity with LMS and only need the wifi functionality at the moment.

Thanks

AdamF1 · ‎10-28-2014

Prime and WCS are completely different beasts.

Based on what you have in your environment you need a much beefier VM. Remember these are not customizable either. Only one .OVA can be customized (2.0- and later). You have to assign it the resources it requests or it may not function correctly.

I would also go to prime 2.0 because they changed the OVA sizing around and based on what you had you will have to blow it away and deploy a new .OVA.

The link below is to the 1.3 - You should be running at least a medium or large. 2.0 you would be able to get away with the custom ova.

http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/collateral/cloud-systems-management/prime-infrastructure/deployment_guide_c07-721232.html

chris.brunt · ‎10-29-2014

I'm finding it very difficult to justify a business case for the system resources this product requires. It uses more resources than most of our business application servers! We have just a handful of network engineers using it. We are not asking it to do any more than WCS was which ran very well with a fraction of the resources. As a dedicated linux appliance, it seems to have more overheads than a Windows server which I find baffling.

At the moment I simply cannot give it more disk space, so will have to make do. I have extended the partitions by 50GB which has helped.

I need to work out what is maxing our the cpu and the errors with the web interface as a priority.

Can I look at CPU time and find the bad process?

Kitri Waterman · ‎11-11-2014

Chris,

You really need to get into the 2.x Prime series. 1.3 / 1.4 are just pure garbage in terms of speed, disk mgmt and bugs. It's not a fun upgrade either. I recommend doing a clean install of Prime 2.x and leaving 1.x behind completely.