HP SIM questions

[mikeyscott]

Capacity planning

Network traffic
1. How often does the discovery run?
2. How much discovery traffic is generated?
3. How often are inventories run and how much traffic is generated?

Storage
We are looking to use HP SIM for monitoring server health, deploying updates using version control and using managing virtual machines.
1. Is there a general event size/average number of events per type of device per day/week/month
2. Are there large differences in storage requirements on different device types

Security
1. We are running a single forest in multiple domains. Although HP SIM can monitor server health using "trust by certificate", without setting SIM up in the root domain with an enterprise admin account, what permissions/rights can be granted to an account to allow OpenSSH to deploy updates
2. As above but for monitoring virtual devices

[David Claypool]

Network traffic

[In general, while this may have been a concern on 10Mb networks of the past, HP SIM management traffic is just a blip on today's 100Mb and 1Gb networks]

1. How often does the discovery run?

Autodiscovery is customizable by IP range and frequency. It should be set based on the rate of change in your network.

2. How much discovery traffic is generated?

Discovery is a set of pings. Retries are set at a default of 3, but can be customized. The more successful pings, the less traffic. When a ping is successful, it begins the identification process, kind of like playing 20 questions to find out what a device is. It depends on how many protocols are enabled and how successful the identification process is that determines how much traffic; e.g. there are 320 SNMP identification rules; if a device is identified as having SNMP but fails all attempts to further identify, it will fall through all 320 SNMP gets.

3. How often are inventories run and how much traffic is generated?

Data collection is run by default every 2 weeks and can be customized as to frequency. Approximately 2K of data is collected typically from a ProLiant.


Storage
We are looking to use HP SIM for monitoring server health, deploying updates using version control and using managing virtual machines.
1. Is there a general event size/average number of events per type of device per day/week/month
2. Are there large differences in storage requirements on different device types

See the HP SIM Sizer referenced below.


Security
1. We are running a single forest in multiple domains. Although HP SIM can monitor server health using "trust by certificate", without setting SIM up in the root domain with an enterprise admin account, what permissions/rights can be granted to an account to allow OpenSSH to deploy updates

What kind of updates? Version control uses secure HTTP, not OpenSSH. The HP SIM certificate is not tied to privileges of a root domain; you trust HP SIM based on local privileges you want to assign.

2. As above but for monitoring virtual devices



Use the HP SIM Sizer from http://www.hp.com/go/hpsim --> Technical Support to get information on host size, network traffic and database requirements for your environment.

[Cindy Osborn]

Just wanted to add that SIM doesn't care about the multiple domains. As long as the SIM server is in DNS for any separate domains that have their own DNS such as a DMZ type domain then use the fully qualified name or ip address to get the SIM certificate and all will be fine. I have about 7 windows domains and don't have any problem in this area with one SIM box managing all the domains.