SIM vs System Management Homepage 2.0

[David_1012]

Hi,


I am responsible for a few customers servers. They only have one each, a Proliant ML350 G3/G4 or sometimes an ML150. They are all running SBS 2000/2003.

In the past I didn't really know what SIM & SMH was so I just left them be. Until recently I was at a customer and saw that one of their disks had crashed, and their RAID was in something called interim recovery mode. I read up on some stuff and found that with the HP Event Notifier I could have gotten a mail telling me when the disk crashed.

Now I found on the HP website the following 3 management softwares:
- HP SIM 5.0
- HP System Management Homepage 2.0
- HP Proliant Essentials

Which one would you reccomend I install on our customers servers? I haven't found a document stating the differences between those 3.

Anyone where who can enlighten me?


thanks,

David

[Aravindh Rajaram · Accepted solution]

First of all, you need to install the ProLiant Support Pack (Available on your SmartStart CD) on your servers. This has the set of drivers and management agents for your server. HP System Management Homepage 2.0 is also a part of this. If this is done you can start monitoring your server using the web browser. This is more like a standalone application and the management capabilites are limited and is not widespread. When you have more servers to monitor and if you need stuffs like e-mail alerts and many other additional management capabilites then you should install HP SIM 5.0. All of these (HP SMH 2.0, HP SIM 5.0) and many other tools which help in monitoring and controlling the ProLiant Servers are part of HP ProLiant Essentials.

Hope this helps!

[Rich Purvis]

Just as an FYI you might find that 100 series server boxes have limited server management capabilities, so you may not be able to get the same software to run on them as you do other non-100 series Proliant boxes. As stated above, the SMH 2.0 is the "single system" view of a server, it is good for drilling down and getting more information. The Windows and Linux agents for the majority of Proliant boxes have an event notifier feature or utility that you can setup to email you when certain events occur.
HPSIM 5.0 is the "multiple server" view. If you have a group of servers or blades that you want to manage and keep tabs on all at once, that is what it is used for. Also, other devices other than servers - that is like a 5 second description for software that would take a couple of hours to get a good overview of. It also has an email/paging capability that is more sophisticated than the agents.
Proliant Essentials for the most part are plug-ins that go into HPSIM and provide value-added features, they usually require a fee for use but HPSIM provies free licenses for people to try them out if they want first.

-Rich