Spiceworks - Hogging resources?

[dgardner]

Hi Guys,

I'm trying to setup Spiceworks on a dedicated VM to handle our IT inventory and Helpdesk ticketing software.

The problem I'm having is when we have the VM powered on, the users complain that login times are very poor. When we power it off, the network kicks back into life.

I have disabled the network scanning tool, but we still experience the same problem.

Info on the network, we have about 600 machines, 3 vmware hosts with about 20 vms in total and approx 1600 users.

Has anyone else experienced this?

[chazzy2501]

Spiceworks crippled a dedicated old workstation of mine it had 16GB of RAM. My network is smaller than yours and I had to remove spiceworks as it was too slow to use.

[localzuk]

Spiceworks is a resource hog, there's no question about that. I have ours in an isolated VM with strict limits on its resource gobbling capabilities. So far it seems to be working ok here. We had to disable the network scanning at my last place, as it just caused the server it was on to crawl to a stop.

[dgardner]

Is it worth looking at something else or shall I fine tune the installation of spiceworks? A lot of people on here use it, which is one of the main reasons we want to run with it.

For free software, the support on the web seems pretty good too.

I have a fairly open mind about what to try.

Thanks for your input.

[Dos_Box]

Moving to Networks and Classroom Management forum.

[localzuk]

The more users and machines you have, the worse it gets basically. It isn't really designed for networks as large as yours I reckon. We have about 250 machines here and it works well, the last place had about 600 and it struggled.

I'd say have a look elsewhere. Maybe GLPI+OCS-NG?

[Dos_Box]

IIRC, the upper limit with Spiceworks is 1000 clients/devices.

[dgardner]

Thanks Localzuk/DosBox, I feared as much. I'm happy to spend money to get the right product.

We already have glpi in place, but the installation was carried out by my predecessor and seems a little jumbled. The support side of it doesn't appear to be great either. That being said, it is a very powerful tool.

[localzuk]

Thanks Localzuk/DosBox, I feared as much. I'm happy to spend money to get the right product.

We already have glpi in place, but the installation was carried out by my predecessor and seems a little jumbled. The support side of it doesn't appear to be great either. That being said, it is a very powerful tool.

Another option I'd seriously consider with a network that size is Microsoft System Center.

[ZeroHour]

SCCM does track inventory etc and SCOM does dedicated monitoring (or on demand for a client for example) and both are enterprise grade so it should handle large large deployments.
Helpdesk wise you will need to find something to bridge that gap though although no doubt there are ways to interface SCCM and helpdesk.

[localzuk]

SCCM does track inventory etc and SCOM does dedicated monitoring (or on demand for a client for example) and both are enterprise grade so it should handle large large deployments.
Helpdesk wise you will need to find something to bridge that gap though although no doubt there are ways to interface SCCM and helpdesk.

SCSM should do the helpdesk bit I believe.

[Chris_Cook]

Spiceworks seems ok for us. We have about 700 computers. We had to do some tweaking to make it usable though. I've set it to do a slow scan, and stopped it scanning broadcast ip addresses. We also have incremental scanning enabled, but that might be a default. Its still a little slow unfortunately, because its otherwise quite a useful bit of software.

[rich_tech]

I stuck it on my old work machine for a while and it crippled it, I then stuck it on a redundant server here and it pretty much crippled that, it is a resource hog of a program, not a bad program, but a resource hungry one that's for sure