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I feel like a total noob for asking this, but I've got two questions:

1)  has anyone here managed to get Ostinato working correctly?  I've followed the User Guide to the letter, and I *think* I've done everything correctly, but I can never get port one to go into the Transmit state, and all I ever see is a trickle of packets for the default port 7878.

To make a long story short, I'm attempting to get it to primarily create a large stream of BGP packets, as well as tLDP, NTP, and RSTP streams.  I've been testing out the latest NTA eval for Solarwinds NPM12, but since I can't ever seem to get the Top 5 AS charts to ever display any data (despite manually manipulate a decent sized amount of virtual machines in different Private AS).

I've wasted a good amount of time trying to get this to work, and am drawing a blank at this point.

2) By necessity, I've been running Solarwinds NPM12 + NTA 4.2 in a Win2K8 R2 VM I created in Workstation Pro 12.1.  Every single time I shut the VM down, and then restart it, The Orion Web Console gives this error when I try to access it. The only reliable way I've found to fix it, is to use the Orion Service Manager to Shutdown Everything (President Madagascar style), restart everything, and then open up control panel -> Uninstall Programs, scroll down to the Solarwinds Orion Network Performance Monitor v12 program, right-click it, and choose "repair".   Once that completes, then it works again.   I've made no changes to anything on the Win2K8 server, and it's always set to the same IP address on vmnet2. 

If I just try the repair process w/o using the Orion Server Manager, sometimes it'll work, but other times it'll generate a new error, this time involving the SQL server.

I also tried this in the latest Virtualbox (blech!), and it exhibited the same behavior.

If anyone has run NPM12 in a virtual environment, could you kindly share what I can do to eliminate this issue?

I'm sorry to say that I haven't used Solarwinds in a long, long time... but I do remember something that you could check.

The reinstall-process-fixes-it is a red flag to me, specifically, that some part of the program (probably a DLL) isn't registering properly. Thus as soon as you restart the environment can't initialize.

IIRC there's an install log generated by NPM, I'd read through that and see if you can find any non-critical errors. I'm guessing that you've already gone through the Windows event viewer to make sure nothing stood out as well.

Vhalidictes wrote:

I'm sorry to say that I haven't used Solarwinds in a long, long time... but I do remember something that you could check.

The reinstall-process-fixes-it is a red flag to me, specifically, that some part of the program (probably a DLL) isn't registering properly. Thus as soon as you restart the environment can't initialize.

IIRC there's an install log generated by NPM, I'd read through that and see if you can find any non-critical errors. I'm guessing that you've already gone through the Windows event viewer to make sure nothing stood out as well.

Like you said, nothing really stood out in event viewer, so I'll see if I can find that install log.  When I restart the VM, and open up orion server manager, I've noticed that most of the processes are stopped, except 3 or 4. Shutting down those, and then restarting everything just results in the same error.  
Since I'm a non-customer (I'm doing an integration guide for a third-party partner of Solarwinds), I was given the email addresses of two of their main "tech gurus", but they just passed me off to AEs and tech support, who've never attempted to contact me. I even asked on Thwack, and two people offered to try and help, but only one responded to my initial email describing the issues, and said he'd "think about it bit by bit, and get back to me", but never did, either.    Same deal with the seed router discovery option not working at all, when using a v15 7200 IOS image, L2 and L3 IOU images, IOSv L2 and L3 VMs exported from VIRL, and even vEOS from Arista.  I can see the NPM VM making the bulk request to a router that has a fully populated routing table, and I know that I've set up SNMP correctly, but it will always immediately fail. :/


EDIT:  Solarwinds tech-support finally got in touch with me, and we've got a conference call scheduled for tomorrow. If we can at least get that "have to repair NPM12 after rebooting the VM" issue resolved, I'll post the solution we arrive at, in another post.

Sweet!  Turns out the fastest way to avoid the entire "having to repair NPM12 after a reboot" issue in VMware is to run Solarwinds Orion permission checker, and then just click repair.  Takes all of 7-8 seconds, compared to the 10-15 minutes it takes to repair NPM12 itself.