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"offline bundle" vs "agentless" offline bundle?

 
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Tedh256
Frequent Advisor

"offline bundle" vs "agentless" offline bundle?

I cannot find a desrcription of when I would use one or the other of these (see copy/paste below).

 

Also - what kind of thing are in the   HP ESXi Utilities Offline Bundle for VMware ESXi 5.0 version 1.2   as I can't find a doc that describes these, either. Maybe it's just that I have not figured out how to work this vast/huge/clumsy hp website?

 

Any guidance/suggestions/descriptions are very welcome and appreciated!

 

HP ESXi Offline Bundle for VMware ESXi 5.x version 1.4 char-hpcru 5.0.3.09-1OEM.500.0.0.434156 February 19, 2013 char-hpilo 500.9.0.0.9-1OEM.500.0.0.434156 hp-smx-provider 500.03.02.00.23-434156 hp-ams-esx-500.9.3.0-13.434156

 

HP Agentless Management Service Offline Bundle for VMware ESXi 5.x version 9.3.0 hp-ams-esx-500.9.3.0-13.434156 February 19, 2013 hp-smx-limited-500.03.02.00.25-434156 char-hpilo-500.9.0.0.9-1OEM.434156 char-hpcru 5.0.3.09-1OEM.500.0.0.434156

9 REPLIES 9
Jags_21
HPE Pro

Re: "offline bundle" vs "agentless" offline bundle?

The below description should give an insight of the bundles.

 

HP ESXi Offline Bundle for VMware ESXi 5.x version 1.4 - The HP ESXi Offline Bundle for VMware ESXi 5.0 includes the latest HP Common Information Model (CIM) Providers, HP Integrated Lights-Out (iLO) driver, HP Compaq ROM Utility (CRU) driver, and the HP Agentless Management Service (AMS).

 

HP Agentless Management Service Offline Bundle - HP Agentless Management Service (AMS) is a service that provides support for Agentless Management and Active Health. Agentless Management Service provides a wider range of server information (e.g. OS type and version, installed applications, IP addresses) allowing customers to complement hardware management with OS information and alerting. Agentless Management provides Integrated Lights Out (iLO) based robust management without the complexity of OS-based agents. Active Health provides 24x7 mission control for servers, delivering maximum uptime through automated monitoring, diagnostics and alerting. The contents of the HP AMS offline bundle include the latest HP Common Information Model (CIM) Limited Providers, HP Integrated Lights Out (iLO) driver, HP Compaq ROM Utility (CRU) driver, and HP Agentless Management Service (AMS).

 

for more info on HP Custom ESXi Image you can always visit the http://vibsdepot.hp.com/

Any personal opinions expressed are mine, and not official statements on behalf of Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
I work for HPE

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Tedh256
Frequent Advisor

Re: "offline bundle" vs "agentless" offline bundle?

This is somewhat helpful - but I'm still not clear - which should I install? Does the agentless management offline bundle integrate with, say, solar winds orion - where the other only integrates with vsphere client and the "hardware info" tab?

 

Or - one of them integrates/provides info to HP SIM, but the other ... what?

 

WHY would I choose one or the other?

 

In a situation where there is no management system gathering information, and I just want to have a web page for each server that I can hit to grab health status info - which would I choose?

 

And what are the utilities - what can I do with them? Why would I choose to download the utilities?

 

Is there a link that provides more complete information about each of these items?

Matti_Kurkela
Honored Contributor
Solution

Re: "offline bundle" vs "agentless" offline bundle?

First, a bit of jargon-busting seems to be in order.

"Offline Bundle" is a specific method for installing drivers, firmware updates and/or management add-ons to VMware ESXi hosts.

 

"Agentless Management" provides basic health monitoring with a minimal OS-level (or in VMware's case, ESXi host level) footprint. As far as I understand, it basically makes the iLO the main source of hardware monitoring information, with some small OS-level (or ESXi host-level) binaries to supply the missing bits from the OS/ESXi side to iLO, and the CIM Limited Providers for integration with vSphere and other things. HP Agentless Management Service Offline Bundle seems to be essentially just the Agentless Management components.

 

HP ESXi Offline Bundle for VMware ESXi 5.x version 1.4 includes the main "Agentless Management" components, and also the "full" CIM/WBEM providers, which might be needed for optimal integration with enterprise management systems.

 

So, if you need to wrest every last bit of performance from your systems for production and are happy with only limited monitoring, you would choose the AMS Offline Bundle only. If you need full monitoring/management information and can spend some CPU power for that, you would install the full ESXi Offline Bundle.

 

On vibsdepot.hp.com main page, the utilities bundle is described as follows:

HP ESXi 5.0 Utilities bundle - ESXCLI utilities such as HPBOOTCFG (boot order configuration),HPONCFG (remote iLO configuration) and HPACUCLI (Smart Array reporting and configuration)

 

So, the utilities bundle can be useful if you use ESXCLI to configure your systems.

MK
Tedh256
Frequent Advisor

Re: "offline bundle" vs "agentless" offline bundle?

thank you!
Tedh256
Frequent Advisor

Re: "offline bundle" vs "agentless" offline bundle?

Quick follow-up to your excellent and helpful post:

Do both packages include the HP "SIM" home-page (where one can hit the ip address with a web-client and get hardware health information? Or is that only the "full" package? Or -does that only work with windows/linux and not with esxi?
Matti_Kurkela
Honored Contributor

Re: "offline bundle" vs "agentless" offline bundle?

I mostly work with Unix/Linux systems and VMs; our company has different group of people managing the hosts.

So I don't have much actual experience on installing management software on ESXi.

 

But the ESXi is supposed to be a very stripped-down "lean and mean" host platform, so VMware might not support installing an extra web server on the ESXi host OS (as would be required for HP SIM System Management Homepage). So I strongly suspect the SIM SMH is for Windows/Linux only. Anyway, I understand that the hardware health information should be available through vSphere once the appropriate CIM providers have been installed. If you have a dedicated SIM server, you can probably integrate the ESXi hosts with it too.

 

The CIM providers provide the hardware health information in a machine-readable form; in the ESXi architecture, pretty-printing it in a form suitable for human consumption or alert generation is simply not in the job description of the ESXi host. Either vSphere or your favorite enterprise monitoring solution (e.g. a HP SIM server) should be capable of doing that part.

MK
ptichdown
Occasional Contributor

Re: "offline bundle" vs "agentless" offline bundle?

Hi,

i did read this thread today.

 

What is the final conclusion?

 

Best way to install the agentless installation?

Will the be a website for every host with hardware-information when doing this install? Which installation is needed?

 

Thx

kahna
Senior Member

Re: "offline bundle" vs "agentless" offline bundle?

Thank You for Your help. 

Still like to know, do we need to install these, if all updates from Vmware are installed? Cause I have loaded both of this, attached packages and remediate : " nothing or no patches to install"

Or am I doing something totally wrong ?

 

I'm using ESXi 5.1 v 1065491 in BL460G7

 

 

HP ESXi Offline Bundle for VMware ESXi 5.x version 1.4 char-hpcru 5.0.3.09-1OEM.500.0.0.434156 February 19, 2013 char-hpilo 500.9.0.0.9-1OEM.500.0.0.434156 HP-smx-provider 500.03.02.00.23-434156 HP-ams-esx-500.9.3.0-13.434156

 

HP Agentless Management Service Offline Bundle for VMware ESXi 5.x version 9.3.0 HP-ams-esx-500.9.3.0-13.434156 February 19, 2013 HP-smx-limited-500.03.02.00.25-434156 char-hpilo-500.9.0.0.9-1OEM.434156 char-hpcru 5.0.3.09-1OEM.500.0.0.434156

Techonium
Occasional Contributor

Re: "offline bundle" vs "agentless" offline bundle?

I had similar questions, and I found this document really answers them all:

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/c03488111/c03488111.pdf

 

Basically, the agentless version rely on iLO 4 for monitoring, and not the OS. There are pros and cons to both, and the document details them all.