HP SIM and WBEM Indications

[Rob Buxton]

Hi All,
Recently David C. asked for some comments on wbem. As a result I started to play with wbem a bit more on a couple of servers.
I finally got wbem to correctly identify and report on our ESXi V4 server. I had to delete and re-add the server into HP SIM and restart the ESXi server to get ID and other things to work correctly.

I also started to try and get wbem indications to report back to HPSIM. From our ESXi server I get a notification: WBEM Providers Started. Turning to windows I see there's a Test WMI Events. All this seems to do is generate an event in the NT Events for the server.
On all servers I've subscribed to WBEM Indications in HPSIM and the data source is WBEM.

So a couple of quick questions:
Are wbem indications meant to work on Windows servers yet?
What do others see if the Test WBEM Events option is selected?

There's not a lot of documentation on wbem around. The bulk of the detailed material I've found is related to HP-UX. While the general description of wbem is useful, it doesn't help when trying to understand how wbem will work on either Windows or ESXi environments.
Anyone found good links to wbem material for ESXi or Windows?

[NJK-Work]

I believe I tested WBEM subscriptions but never got them to work. I too ran the Test WMI events tool and only got an event log entry. I never recieved a test alert in SIM for it.

I know I sound like a broken record (based on my previous posts on this matter), but I have pretty much given up on WBEM for management with SIM. It's just not there yet and a lot more painful than SNMP. But I do have to use it for Virtual Machines as HP does not provide (free) agents for VMs.

Nelson

[Steven Petrillo]

I have seen soo many questions on this, with hardly any real information. So please pardon me if I am asking a redundant question.

Are you both stating that WEBEM on ESX/Windows is not the way to go? SNMP is the preferred method for now?

Steve

[NJK-Work]

I have found no value in the "HP Insight Management WBEM Providers for Windows Server" and do not even install them any more. Virtual Machines I just use the native WMI access since niether the HP SNMP Management agents or the HP Insight Management WBEM Providers for Windows Server can be installed on a virtual machine.

But that is just me. Other people may be completely happy with the WBEM provicers.

Nelson

[Rob Buxton]

On Windows physical servers, with the testing I've done and the information I've found you will need SNMP to send traps from the agents to HPSIM. I've now found that wbem provides about as much information as SNMP via the SMH. I've not done a side by side comparison though. Wbem does seem to be improving.
On Windows virtual servers we let wbem identify the server. We do not use VMM any more.
On ESX we use SNMP only. We have actively disabled the Pegasus service on our ESX boxes as there is an issue where the process was hanging the host server. There's been no resolution to that and it was still there in ESX 3.5U5. It's not widespread so it may be related to our hardware,
On ESXi you still have access to both wbem and snmp. But I have not been able get detailed information back into HPSIM from SNMP. For ESXi I have had to add the HP ESXi offline bundle to the host and then configure it. I've now got reporting back from ESXi using WBEM. Unknown at this point is whether hardware alerts would get back to the HP SIM Server via SNMP. A test trap does work from ESXi.
I would like to see more clear documentation on wbem and how to configure servers for it. I've done most of my stuff through trial and error and finding odd snippets of info. here and there.

[UK-Blr]

pegasus service in esx, many times reboots the esx server automatically.

Best thing to do in esx is to run a cron job to restart every hours / every day.

This fixes the server hung, as well as pink screen PSOD!!

[UK-Blr]

pegasus service in esx, many times reboots the esx server automatically.

Best thing to do in esx is to run a cron job to restart every hours / every day.

This fixes the server hung, as well as pink screen PSOD!!

-UK

[Rob Buxton]

UK - did you ever log a call with Vmware over that?
I got the impression there were not many other sites having an issue with the Pegasus service.

[UK-Blr]

yep, i have logged one very long ago.
There is an article on this issue in vmware kb...
kb.vmware.com/kb/1009607

[Rob Buxton]

OK - we actually eliminated that one as our conditions and errors in the log were different. But thanks for the link.