topic Re: Federated HP SIM Setup Questions in Server Management - Systems Insight Manager

Federated HP SIM Setup Questions

Duckfather — Thu, 06 Sep 2012 11:46:52 GMT

Hi all

I have a few questions about the Federated CMS Setup in HP SIM. We are intending to install 2 or 3 'downstream' versions and have them connected through to out existing version

Our current version of HP SIM is 6.3, while our downstream versions will most likely be the latest version. I'm assuming we will have to upgrade our v6.3 instance to get Federated connections working correcly?
How deep does the Federated connection go between downstream and upstream servers? If a device on our downstream instance triggers an alert, is this passed through to the upstream instance, or does it have to be configured seperately? Will downstream devices use the event triggers of the upstream instance of HP SIM?
We are looking to install Remote Support Advanced on our main HP SIM instance. Will devices on our downstream HP SIM instances be able to report issues / retrieve warrenty data through the main instance or will this need setting up seperately?
Can I consolidate devices discovered in the downstream instances into the Data Center views of our main instance?
How do logon / user permissions on the main HP SIM instance filter down to the downstream versions?

Thanks in advance

Andy

Re: Federated HP SIM Setup Questions

NOVA-Chemicals — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 17:03:13 GMT

Hello,

Did you ever hear from someone or find your answers Andy? I am investigating the Federated CMS fuctionality as well and have the same questions.

We currently have a CMS that is running version 6.3 on HP-UX. I am investigating the possibility of setting up a new CMS on Windows so that we can install and use the Insight Remote Support Advanced functionality. The new Windows CMS would be the main and the older HP-UX SIM (post upgrade to 7.1) would be come a remote CMS.

Kevin

Re: Federated HP SIM Setup Questions

Marcus Svensson — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 06:59:14 GMT

Hi,

I'm also planning to use a Federated HP SIM solution. I have the exact same questions as well. Did you get any reply for the above questions?

Re: Federated HP SIM Setup Questions

Duckfather — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 10:25:50 GMT

Unfortunately, I was advised by HP that, for our solution, which uses Insight Remote Support 7.0.5 extensively, none of the HP SIM instances should be aware of any of the others due to possible issues with getting data back to HP. So the federated setup I had in mind was straight out of the window!

I did get some response to some of the questions though :-

All instances would need to be at least at the same major version
Federation works only for searching. Alerts are not sent to a 'master' instance. In fact, this sort of setup is not currently supported by HP.
Each instance of HP SIM needs its own IRS instance, as the HP SIM plugin in IRS can only take one HP SIM IP address. You can, however, setup IRS without HP SIM, as IRS (from 7.0.5 on) now has its own discovery mechanism, so, as long as your IRS can see all of the subnets etc, you can skip connecting it directly to HP SIM. Unfortunately though, there is still a stipulation that IRS should only deal with 500 devices max, so this may not be ideal for everyone's environment.
Nope, see 2 above.
They don't. See 2 above.

If you are going to use IRS, I do have this advise though : Install IRS 7.0.5.0193 as they are some show stopper bugs in previous versions. Having said that, the current iteration is still very buggy and a nightmare to use due to problems with the GUI / inability to mass manage systems / discovery and monitoring ignoring specific credentials etc. I've installed 4 instances of IRS and am currently in discussions with the developers about these bugs. Feedback so far is that a lot of these are going to be fixed pretty soon :-)

Also, IRS in any sort of resiliant failover environment (like that mentioned in the 'Automating Failover Event Handling on two HP SIM Servers' white paper, or even HA on a virtual instance) is not supported due to the possibilty of the encrypted connection GUIDs, used to talk to HP, changing on failover.

Hope that helps

Andy

Re: Federated HP SIM Setup Questions

NOVA-Chemicals — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 13:53:38 GMT

Helps a lot. Thanks for sharing Andy!