Can't Access SMH via SIM on ESX 3.01 servers

[Scott Huisman]

We have 2 ESX 3.01 farms of 6 servers each, both farms were built from the same RDP job. All of the servers have the System Management Agents v7.70 installed and on half of the servers the SMH is accessible via SIM. The other half report "There is no System Management Home Page for serverXXX".

As has been suggested in many of the forum posts I have run Identification jobs on the servers, Data collection jobs, deleted the systems out of SIM and re-added them, and reinstalled the management agents package. Nothing seems to work! I should mention that even though the pages aren't accessible through SIM they are accessible from the local server and through https://servername:2381.

I've noticed one difference between the functional systems and the non-functional systems is the available protocols listed under product description. The functional systems have "HTTP:, SMH:2.0, SNMP:1.0, SSH:SSH-2.0-OpenSSH_3.6.1p2"and the non-functional systems only have "SNMP:1.0, SSH:SSH-2.0-OpenSSH_3.6.1p2". The problem appears to be that both the HTTP and SMH:2.0 protocols are missing and that's why it's not working correctly.

Any assistance clearing this up would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!

[Rob Buxton]

If the page is accessible from the HPSIM Server using the IP address as noted above I'd next verify SNMP is set up correctly.

Compare the /etc/snmpd/snmpd.conf files are the same.

[Scott Huisman]

The problem is that the homepage isn't working through SIM. I have compared the snmp.conf files on the working servers to the non-working servers and they are the same. SNMP is working correctly since when I go to the SMH page manually the system is identified correctly and the hardware reports correctly. The only problem seems to be the difference in the available protocols.

[Rob Buxton]

Can you browse to https://servername:2381 from the HPSIM Server itself?

You might want to check the ESX firewall file, but I can't see why that would stop only certain requests;
/etc/vmware/firewall/services.xml

How do the servers show in HPSIM, are they correctly identified? Or do they show "unknown"?

[Scott Huisman]

I can browse to the https://servername:2381 from the HPSIM Server no problem.

I've compared the firewall file between a working system and one that's having this problem and they appear to be identical.

Finally the servers are identifying correctly as dl585 G1's, so SNMP is working properly. Thanks for the suggestions, I appreciate your continued assistance.

[Rob Buxton]

Doesn't make a lot of sense.
I'm not too sure what else could make HPSIM not discover the protocol. Especially after a delete and rediscover from HPSIM.

You might want to try running mxnodesecurity -l from a cmd prompt on the HPSIM Server. You'll need to cd to the bin directory of the HPSIM install.
Just check what HPSIM thinks the SNMP and if you use them wbem settings in use are.
I use wbem here to identify the guests. It's enabled globally but with no credentials. I then enable it specifically for the VM guests plus VM Host servers.
I've also found that the mxnodesecurity command sometimes gives different results from the web page.

[Dana Swanson]

Hello,

I had the same problem with the HP Agents for VMware ESX Server 3.x 7.7.0.

Try adding one managed Guest VM to the ESX server your having this issue with and see if this fixes the problem.

When I was having the same problem a few things were changed on the ESX 3.0.1 server by our ESX admin that I think fixed the issue.

The changes were:

a. The ESX server was added to the farm
b. A test guest VM was added to the server
c. The ESX server was patched with the latest security patches from VMWare

On c I don't know what patches were installed since our ESX admin installed them. If your still having the issue after adding the ESX server to the farm and adding a test VM let me know and I can try to get the patches that were installed to the ESX server.

Dana

[Scott Huisman]

Rob: I tried what you said (running mxnodesecurity -l) and the server is reporting everything correctly. The line that I get back says
"abvmw021.ent.agt.ab.ca snmp TMON-R TMON-C
abvmw021.ent.agt.ab.ca wbem root ********
abvmw021.ent.agt.ab.ca ssh root ******** "

Dana: These trouble servers are already part of a HADRS cluster and have many production VM's on them so if you could let me know what patch it was that your team applied that would be great.

[Dana Swanson]

Hi Scott,

If you search for these patch numbers on the vmware site they should all point to a patch for ESX 3.0.1:

4825991
5095559
5140477
6704314
7302867

This one was a mystery to me as well. I called another admin here running the hp insight agents for ESX 3.0.1 and he had the same type of issue and it just started working one day.

Sorry I can't give you a real specific solution. It just started working here as well.

Dana

[Rob Buxton]

Just guessing now as I cannot see anything obviously wrong.

Check the output from mxnodesecurity for those servers working okay.
Also try an Identification, again against a working and non-working server and see what the differences are.

I don't use SSH for any kind of access, don't know if that would get in the way or not.

As regards the ESX firewall, just check there are no other files in the directory that contains services.xml