HP SIM and ESX 3 - what can be done?

[Rem-8]

I have a question for a HP specialist:
What can be monitored via HP SIM from ESX 3 server.

Well, we can see if the host is available or not (pinging)
We can receive alarms from System Management thresholds on HDD, CPU...

What else can be monitored? System Management shows also network availability, but in SIM it doesn't show anything.
Is it also possible to receive data from ESX WBEM source? If so, which WBEM should we install.

Thanks for quick reply

[chimera]

Have you purchased and installed the VMM (virtual machine management) pack? Without it monitoring ESX hosts and guests is pretty limited. VMM gives you alot more options, such as stop, start, restart, migrate, show performance data etc. Personally I prefer to use the VI client for this but if you want everything in one nice interface, get VMM for your servers.

[Rob Buxton]

The HP Management Agents for ESX provide most of the monitoring you see from Windows Hosts.
So you have similar threshold stuff as well as the monitoring of devices.
There does seem to be an issue where NIC failures are not reported back. This has been identified in several separate threads in the forum.
If you do get VMWare's VirtualCentre then you can also configure that to send SNMP Traps back to HPSIM, you'll need to load the VMWare MIB's to resolve the traps.

[Rem-8]

Thanks for that replies.

I don't think that there is VMM for ESX3, only for ESX 2.5.x, so that will not work unfortunately. I don't remeber also registering those MIB's, so could that be the reason that we've received only traps such as Generic 6 or Generic 4 ?

We also have VirtualCenter so that really help us investigate it with SPI for VMware. Are there any enhancements that can be made to gather more from VMWares like VMM ?

[Ole Thomsen_1]

Sure there's support for ESX3 in VMM 2.1 :-)

http://h18013.www1.hp.com/products/servers/proliantessentials/valuepack/vms/index.html

Ole Thomsen

[Rem-8]

WOW :) Thanks for that. My last question - we have ESX 3.0.1 and this VMM works with ESX 3.0. Are those compatible?

[Ole Thomsen_1]

Yes, runs fine on 3.01

Be aware that the agent must be at least 7.60B, I have seen that there is a 7.70 but not applied it.

Ole Thomsen