HP Server Management Agents: SNMP or WBEM

[shocko]

Hey guys, just wondering who's using the HP Insight WBEM providers and what they think of them? Personally, I haven't used them much as I've found (in the past) that they crashed a lot on my systems. However, for interoperability with other systems, they would make life so easy as your could easily pull information from them by querying the HP WMI namespace. It would be easy to add ,say, firmware information to SCOM/SCCM etc.

Also, the WBEM agents appear to be richer in reporting firmware infomration (i.e. disk firmware is reported by the WBEM agents but not by the SNP agents)


Any opinions/thoughts welcome

[jim goodman]

The WBEM providers have come a long way in a pretty short time - I advise my customers to with new builds of G6-G7 Servers to consider using the Providers and grow the environment into them.

[shocko]

I'd like to implement them accross my organization for security reasons mainly (considering using them with a DMZ) and laso for interoperabilty with other monitoring systems.

[jim goodman]

I think that is a good reason to migrate - I think they are plenty stable in the current versions, at least I haven't experienced the problems of the early releases nor have received any negative feedback. There will always be potential for issues with anything in a given environment, but in general I have become much more confident in them as opposed to even a year ago when I didn't recommend them at all.

[shocko]

Benifits of WBEM over SNMP:

- Granular security i.e WMI namespace security

- More information

- Disk drive firmware listing available in version control

- Option in SMH to disble monitoring of mangement processor i.e. iLO. This is useful for servers with ilo not connected to network

[PhilC_1]

Hi - I've found this thread useful. One more question to add... if I start to deploy the HP Insight WBEM providers then do I also still need the HP Insight Management Agents? I was under the impression that these are only required for SNMP, but I may be wrong.
Thanks, Phil

[shocko]

You only need the insight management agents if you wish to use snmp. In fact, both agents can co-exist i.e. wbem and snmp but thsi is wasteful unless you have mutiple monitoring systems monitoriung the server with different protocols

[shocko]

I also not one annoyance with the WBEM providors installer. The latest version will install even on systems it doesn't support i.e dl380 g3 servers. this is annoying. Also, in the SMH VCA, the latest shows as available for install on such systems :(

[Rob Buxton]

Just a note on wbem, if you're using Vmware ESXi, then wbem is the only choice you have. So it seems more and more is moving to wbem.

[shocko]

Thats a good point Rob. Thanks for the reply