System Management Homepage with WBEM

[Reuv]

A few months ago we started to enable the WBEM option instead of SNMP when monitoring our servers. Ever since then we have started to see some "funny" things. For example, on some systems, with WBEM used, we could not see any option to check/modify the ASR (Automatic Server Recovery) option. Just today, HPSIM was reporting an error on my server. I didn't know what it complained about, so I went to the Systems Mangement Homepage and went to look at the Integrated Management Log. Everything there was with a severity of repaired. So, I went and switched to SNMP. Went back to the log, and walla - I see that I have some Blue Screen issues. When switching back to WBEM, I now did see the Blue Screen errors, but wondered why WBEM didn't pick them up, but only SNMP did. Another time, I cannot find the link for the Version Control Agent when WBEM is enabled. I need to switch back to SNMP to see it.

We are using Windows 2008, 2008, 2008 R2, in x64 and x32 versions, and have pretty much seen these problems accross the board, seldomly, but still enough times that we are thinking of switching back to SNMP for everyone. Is there any explanation for the weird things we are seeing with WBEM? Is there any reason to use WBEM over SNMP if it seems that SNMP works just fine?

[Reuv]

Forgot to mention, that this occurs on a variety of HP Servers, ranging from ML350 G2/3/4, to Blade G1/6. Also, we have installed the latest firmware and PSP out.

[Rob Buxton]

Not quite the same issue here.
I found that when looking at the IML using Firefox that the page reported the presence of the IML entries and even that they were critical. It just didn't display the IML entries themselves.

[Reuv]

Did you try in IE? I believe that when I saw the problem I logged onto the server console and opened up the SMH using IE8 and I think that is where I saw the problem.

[BPE]

Hi
Did you check the documents under www.hp.com/go/hpwbem -> Document tab?
You can find an
HP Insight Management WBEM Providers for
Microsoft® Windows Server® 2003 and
Windows Server® 2008 SNMP Data Migration Guide

which shows you the differences between snmp and Wbem e.g:
MIB OID 1.3.6.1.4.1.232.1.2.2.1.1.9
MIB OID Name cpqSeCpuSocketNumber
WMI Class and Property HP_ProcessorLocation.LocationInfoDesc and
HP_ProcessorLocation.LocationInformation
Notes See the P00124 â HP Location Profile document for
determining location information

A lot of reading but some of the funny things are perhaps nolonger funny.

[Rob Buxton]

Reuv,
Opened a separate thread. It does indeed work with IE, but not with FF.

In answer to your initial question, I'm using WBEM as that's really the only option when it comes to Vmware ESXi Host servers.
I'd rather just have one protocol to deal with.
WBEM has been slowly catching up to SNMP, but it's still not there yet. No thershold management for a start.
If you're just running Windows servers and don't ahve the virtualisation layer, then SNMP is superior.
But HP do seem to be moving to WBEM. So you may ned to swap at some point.