high level newbie questions

[jimmyd_1]

i just took ownership of our SIM infrastructure. for testing i created a vm running windows xp and would like to monitor it via sim. questions:

do i need snmp running on the xp machine?
do i need an agent installed on the xp machine?

is this an either/or situation? im confused as to what info is gotten via snmp as opposed to installing an agent of some kind. can someone please clear this all up for me?

thanks

[NJK-Work]

Without paying any money to HP, you can use WBEM to monitor it. That is what we do (at least with virtual servers - I guess I can't say for sure for XP workstations).

Setup a WBEM account in your domain and give it local admin rights to all your VMs you want to monitor. Set your SIM server to use this WBEM account as its global account for WBEM.

I am pretty sure SNMP is not needed in this config - but we still have it for historical purposes on our VMs.

HP provides an agent for VMs but requires the HP agents installed on the host (ESX):

"HP ProLiant Essentials Virtual Machine Management Pack" - http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/servers/proliantessentials/valuepack/vms/index.html

I don't use it - so I don't know anything about it...but lots of other people on this forum do.

Nelson

[jimmyd_1]

thanks. how do i specify to use webm to monitor? and what about specifying exactly WHAT i want to monitor? i come from a nagios background and i have to say that sim is looking much less than configurable when compared to nagios :(

[NJK-Work]

WBEM is there by default in SIM. If you go to "Options - Protocol Settings - Global Protocol Settings..." you will see an option for "Default WBEM Settings". This is where you put in your domain wbem administrator account name and password.

From that point on, SIM will use WBEM wherever it can. As long as you made that WBEM administrator a local admin of your managed nodes.

It will use WBEM to ID and inventory your server. But I guess to answer your original question, yes you will need SNMP to receive alerts.

With the new HP agents (for physical machines) you can use WBEM exclusively and it will send alerts (I believe) without SNMP. But that is not available for VMs using just WBEM and not HP provided agents. I am not 100% certain on this.

Nelson