Installing Service Essentials Remote Support Software on seperate machine

[Birkoff]

At the moment i have this software installed on a Windows 2003 R2 VM, that also has HPSIM installed (5.1 of course).

After struggling with the configuration for the past 2 days i found various comments on this forum stating that the Remote Support Software has to be installed on a physical proliant machine for serial number retrieval.

Why this is required remains a mystery to me, but because i would like the contract and warranty functionality enabled i probably have to change my configuration.

I'm wondering if it's required to have both HP SIM and the Remote Support Software Manager (RSSM) on the same physical machine or if it's possible to only install RSSM on the physical box, which would then communicate with the SIM installation runing inside a VM.

Somehow i'm not able to visit http://docs.hp.com/ here in the netherlands (checked multiple sites and internet connections... just timeouts) so i can't get to most of the documentation at this time.

For more information concerning my issue you can also visit http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=1112595&admit=-682735245+1175610873630+28353475

best regards,

Jasper

[Rob Buxton]

For the HPSIM docs you could try starting at hp.com/go/hpsim and take the link to the Information Library.

I've not seen anything in the Installation Guide or during the installation of HPSIM 5.1 that seemed to indicate you could separate the RSM out onto a separate server.

Why it needs a physical server I don't know either, at a guess that the request is coming in from somewhere that has an HP Server rather than accept requests from all hardware vendors.

[Birkoff]

Today i was able to go to docs.hp.com again and read the release notes of the Remote Support Pack (http://docs.hp.com/en/5991-7388/5991-7388.pdf).

It does indeed state that "The Remote Support Pack requires a single physical system allocated for HP SIM. If you run HP SIM 5.1 on a Windows Virtual Machine, you will not be able to use the Remote Support Pack."

This means I have to move my entire HP SIM installation to a physical proliant machine. This also means that i have to change all my network equipment and integrated software with new ip adresses for snmp trap information.

I cannot simple change the ip-address of the physical machine and also i cannot add the ip address of the original VM because that machine also contains other management software which would take quite some time being reconfired with new ip information.

this kind of sucks to be honest...

[Rob Buxton]

That requirement is only there if you're going to use the RSM components.
If you don't need that aspect of HPSIM, it will quite happily run on a Virtual Server and is supported.
Both RSM and support for Virtual Servers were introduced as part of HPSIM 5.1

[Jesus Malena]

I'm sorry gentlemen, but I must intervene in this matter. You can run HP SIM 5.1 with the Remote Support Pack on a VM as long as it is running on an ESX VM, I repeat as long as it is running on ESX 3.01 and it is a server version OS. Here is the link to the document that states this;

http://docs.hp.com/en/431828-002/ch03s01.html

And just in case you needed to know I'm running it on an ESX 3.01 VM right now.

Jesus

[Birkoff]

Well I am running HPSIM 5.1 on a Windows 2003 R2 SP2 VM inside ESX 3.0.1 on a Proliant DL385 server that also has the management agents installed.

The RSM components don't work with this configuration. If you got the RSM working inside your VM, then please give us some info on what you did.

There are a lot of people (lets say everyone else) that didn't get it working....