How to configure HP SIM for HP DL and Blades running VMware ESX ?

[Server-Support]

Hi,

Can anyone please elt me know what to do to make HP SIM v6 to perform regular scan and report if there is any hardware failure in my HP DL rack and BL blades servers ?

I don't et any error or warning sent by HP SIM when the server is running VMware ESX, but somehow it works fine with server running normal Windows Server OS.

[LGentile · Accepted solution]

Just a few things:

- if ESXi, you need to use WBEM subscriptions - SNMP will not work since there are no SIM agents for ESXi.  You can subscribe to events by using the task under Options - Events - Subscribe to WBEM Events.  You can select one server or the entire VMware collection.

- if ESX 4.x, you need to be sure you are using the 64-bit libraries, designated in your snmp.conf file on the hosts. It will be the first line of the snmp.conf file and should look like this:  "dlmod cmaX /usr/lib64/libcmaX64.so".  Also, you need to be sure you have the HP agents installed and configured for your version of ESX.

Always make sure SNMP settings are correct for ESX..

If you want to see what your issues are, you can run 'Identify System' under Options to have SIM rescan the machine. Or, you can delete the machine from SIM and re-discover it.  Pay attention to the results of the discovery/identify task and SIM will tell you if anything is not configured properly.

Hope this helps!

[Server-Support]

Hi LGentile,

Yes I'm using all ESXi 4.1 for the Blades and the DL 380 servers. So is that the stting in the HP SIM or is that in the vSPhere setting ?

[LGentile]

If you are using the HP Embedded install for ESXi, then you will have something call CIM providers running on the ESXi hosts.  They are like "mini" agents that report health status to a watchdog process.  That process then feeds information into vCenter (your hardware health tab) and to SIM once you allow WBEM subcriptions.  I am not an expert with this, you may want to read up on WBEM and ESXi hosts (HP has documentation on this).  If you are not using the HP Embedded install, you will have to add these CIM providers (also documented) using a CLI script or manually (we use a script, i have not configured this myself).

In SIM, go to your ESXi server (or the entire collection if you have one set up), and go to Options -> Events -> Subscribe to WBEM Events.    Let this run (only takes a few seconds per server) and when complete, you should be able to see events from the servers.   You will also see health status for all components (hard drives, power, etc).

Note that 'existing' conditions will not generate new WBEM events.  If you have a test VMware host, you can try pulling out a power supply to generate an event.

[LGentile]

One extra thing i wanted to mention, is that i set up an automated event handler that runs the WBEM subscription task when new servers are added to a specific VMware collection that I set up.  If you want to know how to do this, i can outline what I did.

I make heavy use of automated tasks to reduce the administrative load on my team.

[Server-Support]

Cool, many thanks for the advice.

[Server-Support]

Wow, how did you automate that process ?

because it seems that I do not need to reconfigure every server to report to HP SIM ?

[LGentile]

Well, what do you need to automate?  If you just need to run the WBEM subscription for all of your ESXi hosts, you can create a collection and just run the task through Options - Events - Subscribe to WBEM events and use the VMware collection you created as the target for the task.

If your environment changes often and you add ESXi hosts to SIM on a regular basis, then you would want to automate this so you don't have to run it every time.

To do this:

- First create a new SIM collection by attributes.  Use the Operating system attribute and use the "contains" operator, then ESXi for the value.  Save this collection and call it ESXi or whatever you like

- Next, create your event handling task to subscribe to WBEM events when new servers are added:

• Go to Options -> Events -> Subscribe to WBEM events.
• Select the ESXi collection you created before as the target
• On the Task Confirmation page, click Schedule
• Here you can name your task, and also select my favorite condition:  When new systems or events are added to the collection
• Then just click Done

Try adding a new ESXi host.  You can go to the Task Results page to watch the tasks run.  Once the automated task you created is done, go check on the hardware status of the server you just added - if it worked you should see everything light up without having to do anything else.

I use this type of event for a lot of things.. another favorite i created is to force a hardware poll on a system when an event is received, so SIM always has up to date hardware status information if a trap is generated.