ESX disk monitoring with SIM

[David Claypool]

Mark, WBEM is not available for ESX hosts. The data source option is only for Windows hosts with the optional WBEM (WMI) providers loaded.

[Superfly.nn]

Mark,

I'm pretty sure that WBEM default data source is only a Windows feature as per the following:
https://forums11.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=1285577

Keep the ideas coming though as this is the most info/feedback I have been able to get on this issue.

Any thoughts on the snmp config I posted?

[Superfly.nn]

Also,

I am not using VMM - only the HP ESX agent (Version 8.1.1)

[marsh_1]

david,niall,

did'nt know that about the esx agents, thanks.

niall,

the snmp config looks fine, the traps you sent were they from smh ? and received ok on sim ?

[marsh_1]

niall,

also check event filter settings in hp sim just in case.

[Superfly.nn]

Mark,

We sent test traps from SMH and we received emails in relation to them. When I check the events in SIM server we are able to see the test traps listed.
There are no event filters setup in HP SIM.
I'm starting to think the storage agent on the host is the source of the problem. Possible a firmware upgrade for the HBA's + local scsi controller. I know it's one of the first things HP support will ask me to do if I call them.

[marsh_1]

niall,

agreed , they always do - latest firmware latest patch :-). apart from running event configuration from sim to the esx server there really doesn't seem to be much left it could be or to check !

[Olivier Masse]

I've personally ran into a few bugs with the SIM ESX agents which I won't detail here. The ESX agents are ported from the Linux agents, so maybe they know how to monitor ext3/reiserfs/xfs/etc but don't know about vmfs at all.

Yet assuming you eventually make your disk monitoring work, I wouldn't trust it anyway... you'll have to test it each time you update SIM, the agents or ESX itself.

If you feel up to it, you can save yourself some worries and try to run from SIM a script that uses the VI toolkit to report the space. For example, there is a sample "diskfree" perl script available. See here: http://communities.vmware.com/thread/137364

In my case I have a job that does an SSH to the service console to run a homemade shell script to monitor my vmfs filesystems but it's not a long term solution. In the future (ESXi) we'll all have to use the toolkit anyway.

Good luck

[Superfly.nn]

While we did not fix the problem head on, we did manage to get around it buy moving all our ESX hosts to an alternative SIM server.
We uninstalled and reinstalled the agents (8.11) to each ESX hosts and setup a trust. So far we have managed to set disk thresholds and are getting the Alerts as expected. So our problem was either with the SIM server or the Agent that was installed on each host. My guess is the SIM server.