Pros and Cons of the 3 installs?

[TButler]

As far as I know there are three different installs for SIM;

HP Insight Management Agents
HP WBEM Providers
HP SNMP

What I don't know which is the best way to go, so if anyone could point out some of their main pros and cons, I would much appriciate it.

Thanks,

Tom

[NJK-Work · Accepted solution]

From my own experience, it is OK to install the WBEM providers, but they are lacking many features:

1) No cluster support in SIM without the HP management agents also installed.
2) SIM reports error, but when you go to SMH (when WBEM is the default view) you see NO errors on the front page. You have to dig into the IML to see the errors and clear them. If you use SNMP as the default view it shows the errors right away on the front page.
3) WBEM has no link (anywhere) in SMH for ASR viewing. So if your server gets an ASR there is no way to see it in the SMH. You have to switch to SNMP view in SMH to see the ASR link.

Thus if you install ONLY WBEM and not Insight Management Agents, you are missing a bunch of things. If you install both, you are better off.

The HP agents require SNMP...so you need that if you install the agents.

You need WBEM for basic VM managment if you wish to add VMs to SIM (and have not purchase the VMM package). You cannot install the HP agents on a VM (well it might be possible but it gives you no value and may even cause problems such as server hangs).

Nelson

[Rob Buxton]

You get better alerts etc. if you install the agents. And they need SNMP as a pre-requisite. The agents monitor the hardware. SNMP is still the backbone of the identification process.

There is a general change towards wbem and wbem notifications. If you're running VMware ESXi then that's the only option as there isn't anywhere to install the agents.

Also that's not really anything to do with HP SIM directly. HPSIM can use agents, SNMP or WBEM depending on the target client. So the install of HPSIM doesn't change. It's how you set up the discovery / identification of the clients. And taht can be configured globally as well as server / device specific.