Version Control Repository Manager in Warning Status; Agents not reporting software status

[Geremy Wong]

Hi,

I'm in the process of moving from Compaq Insight Manager 7 to HP SIM 4.2. In doing so, I have installed the HPSIM on a new machine (Windows Server 2003 SP1). Additionally, I've installed Version Control Repository Manager 2.1 on the same machine.

When I configure the Version Control Agents on other servers, their software status is Informational and not Warning or Normal. These machines run Windows 2000 Server SP4.

My *guess* is that this issue might be related to the VCRM reporting a Warning Status (when I look at Options -> Version Control Repository in the SMH) although I can't see what is causing this (I've gone through the VCRM logs and the Application logs). Interestingly, the management server reports to itself with no problems.

The service is started and the trust relationship between SIM and VCRM looks OK. Does anyone out there have any idea as to what I might have done wrong?

[Rob Buxton]

Before the SW status in the HPSIM System Page will change the Software Polling task needs to run.

If after that there is no change then it would seem the VCA cannot communicate with the VCRM.

From the VCA, you can configure the connections settings and you should then see the status.
Again, this will only be reflected in the HPSIM main screen when the Software Polling task has run. You can kick it off at any time.

[Geremy Wong]

Following the software polling task, it appears that the VCAs on most of the machines aren't talking to the VCRM for one reason or another.

I'm pretty sure that they're configured to talk to the VCRM with a valid credentials, but for some reason I can't get into them to reconfigure them remotely or locally - very strange.

I think I'll update the agents before proceeding. I had hoped I could postpone that step until later and that the older version of the agent would be able to talk to the manager, but apparently not. I'll update the agents before running the software polling again.

[Jason Hindson]

You should be able to utilize the older agents on the servers. An update should not be required. I'm using some very old version control agents with some of my servers that I can't update. You should try to open VCA locally on the servers in question and define the credentials for the new VCRM there, including user/password, server name, and Support Pack version. Good luck.

[Geremy Wong]

Hmm, I've been moving the new agents around to the other sites (it's pretty spread out here) and it seems that I'm having problems configuring the VCA locally - the page doesn't load (it times out) so I can't make any changes to the configuration.

In the test environment with any new servers (with the latest version of the VCA installed) I don't have a problem. I've yet to do an upgrade to a production box, although I can get an older agent in the test environment to do so.

[Darrin Rawls]

We've seen an issue where the system mgmt homepage won't load if the VCA hasn't been configured to talk to a VCRM (this will be addressed in the version that ships with SmartStart 7.40).

In the meantime, you might want to pre-configure a VCA component (only that one component) to specify the VCRM server and login credentials, then reinstall it on that one 'problem' server. See if that helps.

also, if you have the trust relationship setup with HP SIM/IM7 (i.e. you can click on the HW status column and it auto-logs you into the agents), then you do a Replicate Agent Settings (or Group Configuration in IM7) to specify the login credentials and VCRM server and deploy it out to the various VCA's...

Hope that helps.

[Geremy Wong]

OK, I've had some other issues come up recently, so this has been on the backburner. I haven't been able to try some of the things that people have suggested until a couple of days ago, but now I'm just going to

Configuring the VCA locally gave me some problems (the VCA page displaying blank and in one case the HPSMH displaying blank) until I restarted the VCA service. I then re-established the trust relationship (by certificate) from the agents to the new HPSIM server. This seems to have gotten some of the servers reporting their software status back. Others *still* despite being configured (to my eye) correctly still display a '?'.

I tried replicating the settings across servers as suggested by Darrin, but it appears that this does not work for all servers as the version of the agent is different on different servers.

I have some servers which report to a different repository displaying their software status and some of the others which report to the new management server. However, the rest of the servers are a mixed bag. Some have responded to the settings replication, others not. As everything seems to be a bit of a mess in terms of versioning etc, I've scheduled in outages for the servers over a period of 2 weeks to bring them all up to 7.3. I'd like to see what this does before making any sudden moves. I'm hoping that this'll fix most of the issues. Otherwise I'll have to wait for 7.4 before doing anything.