ESX 4.x/ ESXi 4.x IRSA monitoring

[Jamie Ketskemety]

Hello,

I have recently installed SIM 6.2 and IRSA 5.50 on Windows 2008 R2 at two different customer sites and cannot get IRSA to monitor the ESX servers.

One customer has ESX 4.0 servers and the other has ESXi 4.1 servers.

The ESX servers were both installed using the HP ISOs, the Insight Management agents are installed and the System Managment Homepage is accessible.

The servers are being monitored ok by SIM but they do not appear in the Remote Support systems list. I am using the root credentials in the SIM discovery task for the ESX servers.

Is there a specific list of tasks that I need to carry out in ESX and/or SIM to enable these servers to be monitored by IRSA. It seems strange that I am having the same issue in two separate environments with two different versions of ESX.

Has anyone else managed to get this working successfully?

Any pointers gratefully received!

Jamie

[Sudhakar Subramaniam]

Hi Jamie ,
Please follow the below steps.

1/ The FC HBA driver must be installed as per
"As of Insight Management Agent v8.0.0 release, the Emulex and Qlogic libraries have been removed from the Agents product. The libraries will have to be downloaded from the Qlogic and Emulex websites directly. For detailed download and installation instructions for these libraries, please refer to the "README" file, which is included in the downloadable HP Insight Manager Agents package"

2/ From the README.txt which is included in the downloadable HP Insight Manager Agents package:

AGENT CONFIGURATION: ================================================================================ For the storage agents to display the correct information for the Qlogic and Emulex HBAs, the libraries corresponding to the Qlogic and Emulex driver versions have to be installed on the ESX Service Console.

Please ensure that you run through these instructions ONLY if you do not see a link for either the HBA or the target drives in the System Management Homepage.

The following steps guide you through the installation for the corresponding libraries

1.Find the HBA driver version number. (See Additional notes below)

2.Download the libraries for the driver loaded in the vmkernel from the following links:(see additional notes below to determine which driver has been loaded in the vmkernel)

Link for Emulex libraries:
http://www.emulex.com/downloads/emulex/cnas-and-hbas/drivers/vmware.html
Link for Qlogic libraries: http://support.qlogic.com/support/oem_product_detail_vmware.asp

NOTE: The Emulex files that need to be downloaded are the Core Library and the HP Rubah library files.

3.Stop the 'hpsmhd' and 'hpasm' agents by issuing the commands from the service console,'service hpsmhd stop' and 'service hpasm stop'

NOTE: you must be logged in as a user having administrative privileges

4.Install the libraries which were downloaded in step 1 using the install script present in those packages. For the Emulex libraries, please copy the HP Rubah library file to /usr/lib directory on the ESX host (i.e., Copy the file libemsdm.so into /usr/lib directory).

5.For the Qlogic libraries you must rename the library file. Use the following command to rename the library file:
'mv /usr/lib/libqlsdmia32.so /usr/lib/libqlsdm.so'

6.First start the 'hpsmhd' service using the command 'service hpsmhd start'.

7.Then, start the 'hpasm' service using the command 'service hpasm start'.

Additional notes:
To find the version number of the HBA driver that is being using in the ESX system, the information can be found in /proc/vmware/version.

[Jamie Ketskemety]

Hi Sudhakar,

Thanks for your reply but the ESX servers are connecting via standard 1GbE NICs to the core network and using iSCSI to connect to P4000 storage.

FC is not being used in either of the installations.

[Sudhakar Subramaniam]

Installed the latest available version of HP management agents in ESX server.

Configured snmpd file properly in /etc/snmp/snmpd.conf
Edited the /opt/hp/hp-snmp-agents/cma.conf for the NIC settings. Appended the file with trapIf vswif0 . (Where vswif0 is the NIC name)

Commented out Defaults requiretty in /etc/sudoers .

Restarted the below services:

snmpd

hp-snmp-agents

hpsmhd

Checked the SMH is populating properly.

Logged in HP SIM server.

Discovered the ESX host server with proper credentials.

Sent a trap from SMH of ESX server.

Trap is recorded in HP SIM for ESX server and associated email was triggered to the configured email address.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[ITRC Test-CH]

Hi Jamie,
You can check in ../HP/RemoteSupportEligible/Config for the filter criteria and compare it in SIM - Edit System Properties.
After the device Discovery in SIM you may run Identify Systems after having checked/added the proper system credentials.
The correct Management Agents for ESX can be downloaded from www.hp.com/bizsupport; search for your machine.

Regards, Werner

[Jamie Ketskemety]

Ok at the one customer site, after completely uninstalling Insight RSA and reinstalling, I can now see 20 ESXi 4.1 servers in the Remote Support system list within SIM.

However, only one of these servers is showing as being monitored in the Insight Remote Support Connectivity Status page. The other 19 servers have a red cross, which states WBEM connection success, SNMP connection failure.

How do I set all of the ESXi servers so that they are only monitored by WBEM and not SNMP? I tried to turn off SNMP for each server in the System Event Analyser, but it keeps enabling itself again.

[Stan Oleszkowicz]

Has any resolution been found for this? I'm experiencing the same issue.

Thanks,

Stan

[Jamie Ketskemety]

I am still having issues with Insight RSA and ESX/ESXi Hosts.

I have discovered why ESX hosts were not appearing in the Insight Remote Entitlement list - you have to edit the O/S description in SIM and add characters after 'Vmware ESX', such as 'Server' otherwise it does not get recognised by Insight RSA!

So, after overcoming that hurdle, and entitling the ESX Hosts for Remote Support, I am now struggling to get the monitoring working on the Insight RSA Status page.

It shows that connection succeeded with SNMP but failed with WEBEM and so shows a red cross under the monitoring column.

If I disable WBEM completely on the CMS, the Hosts then fail to appear at all in Insight RSA and SIM does not show any of the VMs under each Host.

Is it possible to restrict Insight RSA to use SNMP only but still allow SIM to use both SNMP and WBEM?

Thanks
Jamie.

[Field Systems]

Werners post to this problem helped me overcome this issue today. By reviewing the business rules in config, I saw that the Device Subtype was looking for an additional attribute of VMWARE_ESX_VMHost that was not displayed in the system properties.  By editing the ESX server properties and adding a subtype of VMware ESX Host, and running RSE, not only did my ESX Servers populate IRSA, but they are fully entitled.  Thanks!

Dan