HP DL380 ESXi 5.1 hardware alerts / HP SIM

[mitred]

Hello,

In the past I have always used HP servers with the insight agents installed via Smartstart.  I then connect to the system management homepage on the server and configure the settings I needed for alerting. 

I have now purchased an HP DL380 G8 and have installed VMWare ESXi 5.1 using an HP Custom image for ESX 5.1 downloaded from HP’s website.  The ESXi works fine but I now want to be able to set up alerts for the hardware i.e. send me an email when a disk / psu fails.  I believe that I need HP SIM for this, so my questions are

1. Does HP SIM need to be installed on a separate machine which is always on?  If this machine is off does this mean I don’t get alerts (in previous versions the alerts came from the server itself)
2. How do I connect HP SIM to my ESX server?
3. With previous versions of Insight Manager I used to be able to connect directly to my DL380 server via a web page and manage the settings, can I still do this if so how?

Thanks for any help.

[Sbrown]

You still run SIM, the CIM (esxi health agents) talk to SIM, but you can also get a SIM (not CIM) plugin for Vcenter.

1. Good idea to run it in a VM to take advantage of esxi HA or Fault tolerant mode!

2. Use the HP ESXi 5.1 installer media which has the CIM health agents, install SIM, Install Vcenter SIM plugin

3. You connect to SIM. For the most part what I do for firmware is just ssh in (enable it!) and look in /opt/hp/ .. you can find hpacucli etc. it's not as slick as windows but i've rarely needed to use it except to install HP Smartcache SAAP 2.0 key and add an X25-M cache drive to an existing raid

[Bart_Heungens]

Hi, Depends of what you want. If you only want to monitor the hardware of 1 server, maybe the installation of SIM would be excessive... Know that with the latest firmware of ILO4 you have the possibility to send emails also... Just look for AlertMail... And so you will be alerted by ILO for most of the hardware issues... Only if you want a full view of physical and virtual environment with extended alerting and reporting and so on you may want to choose for SIM kr, Bart

[mitred]

Ok thanks very much for your advice.  I do really only need to monitor the one server so the iLo options sounds interesting.  I basically just want it to email me if a disk or psu fails, which was straightforward in other versions.

Thanks

[Mark Matthews]

I'm not going to offer anything else here, just wanted to say I've come across this 'problem' many times and have tried to work a way around it.
SIM for me is overkill, as you say, when you just want to be alerted to any HDD failures etc.

Setting up the iLO is an option, but can you do any alerting without the (overly expensive IMO) advanced license?

I dont know why HP dont just release a version of the System Management Homepage for ESXi, that would make things much simpler!

[Donald J Wood]

Just one man's opinion here...

I work for a company that has a huge computer and network infrastructure and our managers won't tolerate multiple alerting system and consoles to monitor computer issues. Not just for that reason, there are other reasons we don't use HP SIM. I won’t' get into those details.

• We setup our HP DL380 G7 and G8 servers with ESXi 5.x hardware alerts with traditional SNMP trap alerts and that works fine in our BMC infrastructure.

I know some people are going to ask why we don't use WEBEM and/or HP SIM. Well, I'm not an engineer but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night... in our environment we can't have separate alerting consoles for every computer hardware and software vendor we employ. That in itself would make the environment too difficult to manage. What we have works today and is supported by every company we deal with.

• ESXI doesn't support the 2301 or 2381 services. The System Management Homepage is no longer available with those builds.

In my opinion the loss of the SMHP feature was a step backwards, maybe and oversight by EMC/VMware and Hp I don't know. The only thing we have is the vCenter console hardware tab. Although it does show you most of the hardware it is in no way an equivalent to the SMHP features that we had on or legacy builds.