HP SIM VMM cannot correctly identify ESX Linux guests

[Sean Carolan]

Ok, I've just spent nearly two hours with HP's overseas support folks. Pablo was a nice guy but he was unable to help me with this problem, so I thought I'd try the forums.

I just installed the VMM software and agents and it's working dandy with our ESX servers. I can pull the ESX server up in the SIM software and see all the guests, resource utilization, etc. It shows ip addresses for my Windows guests on this screen, but not for the Linux guests.

The problem is that none of the Linux guests are properly identified as guests residing on a particular host. They are also missing the controls for start/stop/reset, etc. I get this message instead:

"No matching VMM node found for server.yourdomain.com. May be the VM was unregistered from the VM host or the VM host was unregistered from VMM. Install the HP VMM agent. Register the VM host via the Configure -> Virtual Machine Host Registration menu or register the VM via the native virtualization console and Identify the system using Options->Identify Systems."

Here are the things we have tried:

* Re-registering the VMM agents
* Reinstalling the VMM agents
* Deleting and re-discovering hosts and guests
* Re-identifying hosts and guests
* Manually setting system type as "Virtual Guest", etc. for my Linux guests

Does anyone have any ideas how I can get the Linux boxes to show up correctly like my Windows machines do? It's nice to know at a glance what is a virtual machine, and where it resides.

Attached is a screencap, you can see three windows machines. One is powered off, the other two show IP addresses. None of the Linux machines have an IP address listed.

[Sean Carolan]

Attached is another screencap, showing the SIM page for one of my Linux guests. I can only get it to recognize this is a VM by manually specifying "Virtual Machine Guest" under 'Edit System Properties'.

[T. Vander Auwera]

Hi Sean,

Out of curiosity, can U let us know on which OS does HPSIM run?

Thanks,

Tristan

[Sean Carolan]

Our HP SIM software is running on Windows 2003 server. My understanding is that support for the Linux version was phased out some time ago.

We are currently using a demo license to see how the VMM software works, but so far I'm not impressed. If the plug-in can't connect the dots and correctly identify my virtual machines it is not worth the license fee.

At least I would hope there is some way to manually mark these so we know which ESX server they reside on, etc.

[Sean Carolan]

Update:

I spoke with Pablo yesterday and he said there are other customers with this same problem. Apparently it is a known issue, but he didn't have any further information on how to correct it.

I'll leave the thread open in case anyone figures this out, or HP releases a bug fix.

[bruno roncoroni]

Hi,
I have the same problem
HPSIM 5.1 with SP1 in Windows 2003 R2
The linux guest are not view "hosted by" as the windows guest.
On the guest Linux (RedHat ES 4) I installed the tog-pegasus for WEBM and create an identical count on the server HPSIM in "Global Protocol Settings" --> "Default WBEM Settings" (Enabled WBEM)
Thank you if you have other ideas
sorry for my poor English

[Klas Pihl]

Hi,

We have the same symptom. Windows systems is identified correctly and mapped to an ESX host. Linux (RedHat ES 4 & 5) VM:s is listed as system type 'unknown'.

Our SIM server is 5.2 hotfix 1 running on Windows 2003 S SP2 x32.

In the user guide of VMM it says that WMI is needed for VMM/SIM to correctly map the VM to the ESX host. If so, how can HP give market VMM as a component to manage VM:s if they only, basically, support Windows?

Sean, did you ever get an answer on this from HP?

[Sean Carolan]

Yes, after badgering HP for several weeks I finally did find an engineer who knew what he was doing. The fix is a simple, undocumented feature. You need to add the VMWare guest's serial number in the "Edit System Properties" page for it to work. You can retrieve this number using the VI Client. IT looks like this:

50 0d f5 43 94 bf f2 d8-5e b9 a2 ee f2 3a d8 95

Once that is there HP SIM should be able to recognize your guest and properly associate it with the host.

[Klas Pihl]

Sean, thank you for you input. It is promising that it should work.

On the Windows hosts we can see that the serial number and UUID is of the type "VMware-xx xx xx xx xx xx xx xx-xx xx xx xx xx xx xx xx"

In the tab "VM Performance" we have the VM:s, if we press the VM name we get a serial number. Is that the serial number that you used? Did you append the "VMware-" in front of that S/N?

We have tried to copy-paste the serial number that we get from the VM identity but the VM dos not associate with the host. We also tried to append "VMware-" but no luck there ether.

Could you please explain more in depth how you succeeded or if time is short give the name of the technician at HP "who know what he was doing" :)

Regards

[Sean Carolan]

We are mostly a Linux shop so I don't know if this will help you much, but I dug up the document that I got from HP on how to get VMs to properly associate themselves. Below is a note from one of the HP engineers about the document.

****************************

Just a note regarding the document I provided to you. One of the screenshots showed the serial number from the .vmx file as being copied from the uuid.location = " " section. Instead we needed to use the serial number found after uuid.bios = " " section. It appears that for ESX 2.5.2 both those values are the same but with ESX 3.x they are different.