HP SIM with ESX Hosts

[cesarpegado]

So i have HP SIM looking at soe ESX Hosts, that i have it looking at the guests on the hosts. It's just to monitor the hardware of the host. I have a couple of questions

1.  some of my hosts have found a server IP. But 1 of them has picked up with the LAN connections as appose to the IP address of the mgmt ip for the host. Is there a way in SIM to make it only look at 1 IP? and if so how do you choose which IP?

2. i have some hosts which when you hover the cursor over the amber warning in the HS and MP it says "SNMP - There is a server problem that is degrading functionality". Also "Network - A network interface has failed or redundancy has been lost" but when i click it on it i go the ILO page, and the network tab in the system infomation shows that the server has 6 ports of which 2 are ok and the other 4 are in unknown status. i'm assuming this what its moaning about. If so how do i go about ignoring these

[Andrew_Haak]

Hello,

For the first question look at the properties of a server, it's the 2nd tab on e you click on the server. Here you can choose the interface you want to use from the discovered IP adresses.

The second could be an interface that's up but does not have a cable. If so disable the interface in the OS and see if that helps. The status should change within a minute or 5.

[cesarpegado]

Andrew,

I've managed to get 1. working now, it was like you said, but some reason this 1 ip address wasn't linked to the server line, it was linked to something else.

i removed both lines from the DB and then discovered it again and its now ok. as all the ip address came up in the 1 line, and i was able to select the primary ip as the management port.

2. These servers i'm unable to get SMH working on, and i can't disable theports in teh O/S is there a way of ignoring certain alerts in HP sim for certain servers. i.e. in this example, can i ignore the alerts for NIC's on this 1 server. So i'll get any other alerts.

Thanks

[Andrew_Haak]

You can, this would involve creating collections of servers and combine then with certain event collections. With these collections you can create email allerts that would get send to you. Thee status of thee servers however would stay degraded and this is quite a downside to my opinion.

[cesarpegado]

Do you know if you have to use wbem to collect data from the hosts, or can you use snmp. As for some reason i've not managed to WBEM to work even on windows boxes, but snmp data works fine.

[Andrew_Haak]

Hello,

Depending on the version of ESX you can use the SNMP agent (3.5 or 4.x version)
The 5.x versions use wbem for the agent. If your hardware is an Gen8 or newer you can use the AMS agent in combination with AMS settings on the ILO 4. You can also configure the older ilo's to forward allerts to you SIM server using SNMP. This is the ilo's SNMP not an agent.

The WBEM for ESX works quite good if you configure the WBEM subsciption from the SIM interface for your WBEM discovered servers. The only downside to the WBEM Discovery for ESX is that you need root dichts for discovery.

[cesarpegado]

Andrew,

So i've never got wbem working properly. I always thought it was a firewall issue, but i have wbem ports open.

When i do discovery on a server with WBEM, windows or ESX it never finds anything. And when you looks at the managamenet protocols it never shows WBEM as an option. Can you think of something that is missing?

You say you need root for teh subscription. to use the root access do you need to enable SSH access and then do a discovery with an account with root access. Once its discovered do you need it to permently use root access to check the updates. or is it just for the subscription and then you can stop ssh to the esx host?

[cesarpegado]

p.s. i'm running esx 5.5

[Andrew_Haak]

Could you run a Discovery with root credentials and post the log so i can have a look to what's going wrong?

[cesarpegado]

Andrew,

wouldn't you knowit. I've just done a discovery and its worked :)

a couple of issues i can see now

1. Under health status i can only see a green tick next to ping. I was hoping see everything like when you use SNMP and it shows storage, nics etc, do you not get this with wbem, and it you don't. When a disk fails will it show? or is it not managing hardware faults?

2. I've noticed that HP SIM has now found the VM's running on it. We already hve monitoring tools on the VM's so I don't need any more for the VM's. So is there a ways of monitoring the ESX Host without it showing you the VM's running?

3. Obviously you don't have root access in windows, so to run WBEM on a windows box, do you need just local admin rights when running the discovery to pick up WBEM?

Thanks

[Andrew_Haak]

Right a local Admin on Windows server is enough. In the options menu under Discovery there is a general link there you see things used using Discovery like the option to discover guest os om an ESX server. For the missing info on the server itself look if WBEM is detected as a protocol yet.

[n0kia]

1. Under health status i can only see a green tick next to ping. I was hoping see everything like when you use SNMP and it shows storage, nics etc, do you not get this with wbem, and it you don't. When a disk fails will it show? or is it not managing hardware faults?

It should show the component like how you see snmp. the HP Providers is what SIM talks to when monitoring. Do an options > Data collection  to see if that works correctly for that host. Also do a hw/sw status polling when data collection finishes. If you want hardware wbem issues to be received by HP SIM, do an options > Event > Subscribe to wbem events.

2. I've noticed that HP SIM has now found the VM's running on it. We already hve monitoring tools on the VM's so I don't need any more for the VM's. So is there a ways of monitoring the ESX Host without it showing you the VM's running?

You will need to disable sim from picking up the VM when a VM host is discovered option. Option > Discovery >  Configure general settings (hyperlink) > Uncheck {Automatically discover VM guest(s) when the host is identified.}

3. Obviously you don't have root access in windows, so to run WBEM on a windows box, do you need just local admin rights when running the discovery to pick up WBEM?

Yes

[cesarpegado]

finally getting somewhere with this. I've managed to get ESX on WBEM and have stopped discovering of VM's

Next question, we have quite a few hosts that have some nic adapters not being used. I can see how to exclude warning for WBEM, but i have some DL380 Gen8's which the agentless management has also picked up some NICs not being used, and has flagged them as faults in HP SIM. How do i get HP SIM to ignore alerts from SNMP / ILO for NIC cardsnot benig used.

Thanks

[Andrew_Haak]

Try to disable the nics with error as a status from ESX or disable them from the bios.

[cesarpegado]

Andrew,

so theres no way of doing without logging in to the ESX box and disabling the NIC's? you don't just ignore alerts from that like you can with WBEM?

am i right in thinking you shouldn't use WBEM with Gen 8's as they the Agentless management system?

[Andrew_Haak]

Sure you can ignore these errors ot filter them. But the server stays degraded that's my point.

As for the gen8 and 9 you are correct with the AMS agent