Insight Manager WBEM and Lefthand VSS - how do you get it working?

[Andrew Steel]

Hi All,

I have been trying to get Insight Manager to indentify systems and it fails on the wbem discovery:
This system does not have any SMI-S CIMOM installed
This system doesn't have a server CIMOM installed locally, or cannot connect to it using all credentials specified
Running WBEM rules based identification.
Cannot get ComputerSystem WBEM/WMI data from the system

After reading various other posts and checking the config numerous times (disabled windows firewall just to make sure etc) i eventually worked out that the reason it's failing is the Lefthand VSS provider installs a cimserver component that is also listening on 5989.

So the question is: How do you get Insight Manager, WBEM and the Lefthand VSS to play nicely together?

Cheers

[Taha Tungekar]

Hi Andrew,

Which systems are you trying to discover? Windows, linux, HP-UX? ProLiant or Integrity.

Have you tried using SNMP to discover the hosts?

-Taha

[Andrew Steel]

Hi,

I am running dl380 g6's with windows server 2008 r2 (mostly server core installs). These are running Hyper-V with a bunch of VM's - mostly 2008 r2 and some 2003 r2.

SNMP discovers the servers OK. I'm also having a lot of hassles getting the VCA to report correctly (but slowly getting that sorted - reconfiguring the trust by cert, using group policy to set SNMP settings and windows firewall rules).

In trying to torubleshoot this I disabled windows firewall completely on the CMS server and one of the 2008 R2 servers - when it still didn't work I dug a bit deeper. The Lefthand VSS installs a pegasus CIM object manager service that listens on 5989. I'm guessing this is conflicting with the SIM WBEM ports.

The log file for the VSS pegasus service shows:
03/09/10-14:30:18 INFO cimserver: Authentication failed for user=MyDomain\user

(I changed the domain name and user name above - but basically it is the sim service account running the 'identify' task).

My current theory is to change either the SIM port or the VSS port and then test - only problem is I can't work out how to do either on the client.


Cheers

[Rob Buxton]

Andrew,
Where have you installed the Left Hand CIM Server? On the HP SIM Server itself?

In the HP SIM Library there's a document on how to configure HPSIM to run when CommandView is installed on the same server. You might want to check that out as that covers off what you'd need to change.
www.hp.com/go/hpsim and follow the link to the reference library.

[Andrew Steel]

Thanks Rob - I'll check itout though I think it may have bee something similar in one of these threads that got me thinking that the lefthand stuff might be causing issues.

The problem here is the VSS provider is installed on each of the servers accessing the SAN - it installs a CIM service component when you install the VSS provider. So unfortunately it is on all the servers. I'm not convinced it is 100% to blame - after disabling the service and rebooting the server there was nothing listening on 5989. I re-installed the WBEM agents from the PSP and still nothing on 5989 - I'll keep working through it and report back if I have any luck.

Cheers

[Andrew Steel]

OK - I'm running out of ideas.

Is it possible to change the WBEM port that SIM and the HP WBEM agents use (default=5989)?

I can see the setting for the WMI proxy mapper on the server - I'm assuming that will work if changed but how do you modify the agent (or is it not possible)?

Cheers

[Andrew Steel]

Hmmmm - the utilities to change the port and user/pwd for the pegasus cimserver are cimconfig and cimuser - unfortunately they are not included in the installation of the lefthand vss provider (expected to find in the bin dir but not there - searched the c: drive - no joy).

Is it possible to change the conf files directly and if so what is the syntax?

There are a bunch of resource centre postings all saying they changed the conf files but I'm yet to find how...

I'm about to give up...snmp working OK for now. Still no joy with the VCA reporting to SIM (just applied feb 2010 updates for 2008 R2 64bit VCA - SIM still not happy).

[Rob Buxton]

OK.
On windows & linux servers you can get all of the identification and fault reporting from SNMP. So you should be able to get that side of things working.

HP SIM can certainly access wbem using a different port number. It uses 5989 as the default but there's a box for a different port number in both the global and system specific wbem credentials sections.

As for resolving the conflict, well you need to configure at least one of them to use a different port. I'd first concentrate on the Lefthand CIMOM. That way you don't have to mess with all of the others.

But just to repeat, you can fully monitor the servers using snmp.