Insight Management Agents for W2k & W2k3 Virtual servers (ver 4.1)

[Joe Richards]

When I try to install the HPIM agents on a virtual server (VMWare) the installation fails. Is there an agent that can be install on virtual server that works?

Thanx

[David Claypool · Accepted solution]

There's little value in having an agent that looks at hardware details on a virtual server because all of the hardware is simulated. HP Insight agents are closely tied to the hardware of the ProLiant 300 series and above. That's where detailed things like thermal condition and predictive alerts on memory, processor and disk drives comes from. Hosting VMware GSX on a Windows or Linux system you can use the standard ProLiant Insight agents on that physical system; in the case of VMware ESX, a special install for the 'Service Console' that monitors hardware that you can download from the VMware ActiveAnswers page on hp.com: http://h71019.www7.hp.com/ActiveAnswers/cache/71086-0-0-0-121.aspx (look for the link "Insight Manager agents for VMware ESX Server" in the highlights).

That being said, there is a need to have visibility to the status of virtual machines from HP Systems Insight Manager and that can be done in a number of ways:

- Compile the VMware SNMP MIB in hpSIM to receive alerts from the service console when VMs are started and stopped.
- Configure SNMP on each virtual machine so hpSIM can do up/down status polling.
- Enable WMI in hpSIM so it can gather configuration data (although the hardware is simulated, valuable things can be gathered like how many processors each VM is configured to use, disk sizes and space available, etc.)

There also are a number of features in hpSIM that can be useful in dealing with virtual machines, like being able to see an aggregate status of all virtual machines with their physical host.

There is a best practices paper in the works for this, but you also might be interested in a web seminar on the subject that is scheduled for July 20. If you are interested in participating, please send an email to (@ sign removed to defeat spam harvest) manage at hp.com