SIM 6.2 fails to discover Windows 2008 R2 guests on ESXi 4.1

[Justin Williams_2]

We have just rebuilt our VMware servers using the HP bundled ESXi 4.1. We are running HP SIM 6.2 & VMM etc.
SIM can discover the VM Hosts and all of the guests apart from those running 2008 R2. It can discover 2008 R2 Servers running on physical hardware no problem but refuses to identify the virtual versions. (Standard 2008 is fine, its just R2 servers causing a problem)

We have tried installing SNMP, SMH, WBEM, SSH with various credentials with zero success.

The identify fails with the following error

The system cannot be identified properly for HP SIM to manage; unable to get one or more of the following: model, serial number or unique identifier (UUID).

We have run winrm quickconfig on the target server, disabled the firewall completely and pretty much everything else suggested online.

Our VCentre Management server has just been rebuilt as a virtual R2 server, so this is causing major grief as we can't register it in SIM or link it to the VMWare hosts.

Is this a known issue or can anyone suggest what we can try next please?!

Many thanks,

Justin Williams

[David Claypool]

From your description, this sounds like a problem with identification, not discovery.

I'm not sure what you mean by "installing WBEM" since WMI is a built-in component of Windows. Also, HP SIM does not use WS-MAN for identification (or anything else except for sending secure commands to iLO) so "winrm quickconfig" has no function here.

I'm assuming that since other Windows guests are getting identified properly that the "WMI Mapper" is running successfully and that HP SIM has a proper entry for it.

The first thing I would do to debug would be to confirm the ability of WMI to work between the CMS and the target WS08R2 VM. This could be done via a "wmic" command easily, and you'll need to be in an appropriate security context.

The most likely issue is that the account you've attempted to use is not a member of the "Distributed COM Users" group and is then not allowed remote access to DCOM (the transport that WMI uses).

[Justin Williams_2]

Thanks for the response.

Usually we use SNMP to communicate with our servers but our VM guests don't have SNMP installed and are discovered through the host.

We were trying to get SIM to discover the R2 guest by any means possible, hence trying to install SSH, SNMP & SMH. WBEM was just another thing we entered credentials for on the advanced protocol credentials tab.

Yep, the WMI mapper entry is there and correct.

WMI seems to work fine manually as shown below..

C:\Users\XXXX>wmic /node:uklonsimtest computersystem get model
Model
VMware Virtual Platform

C:\Users\XXXX>wmic /node:uklonsimtest bios get serialnumber
SerialNumber
VMware-42 39 5e f9 c3 4b 75 ee-2a 1a 10 1f 0c 74 bf d3

C:\Users\XXXX>wmic /node:uklonsimtest path win32_computersystemproduct get uuid
UUID
F95E3942-4BC3-EE75-2A1A-101F0C74BFD3

We don't have any users or groups in the Distributed COM Users group on any of our servers, physical or virtual.

[Justin Williams_2]

We have managed to resolve this issue. The SIM discovery job had detected the R2 vm guests as 'unknown' or 'unmanaged' and this seemed to stop the association through the VM host.

I deleted all entries for the servers in question and re-ran an identify on the VM host and all the servers were discovered correctly with the right associations.

I also removed the 'unknown' & 'unmanaged' entries from the discovery filter to stop this occurring again.

[Justin Williams_2]

See last comment.