VM Guests showing up as Unknown

[Rob Buxton]

Hi All,
I'm not too sure when this started. But I've just found all of my Virtual Guest Servers are showing up as Unknown.
I'm just creating a new VMWare Server infrastructure and have just got the VMM License keys. VMM sees the Servers fine.

The VMWare Hosts are fine.

They VM Servers use the same IP subnets as physical servers so I do not believe network connectivity is an issue.
I've checked and rechecked SNMP. Even opening up SNMP to Allow all hosts, reverting back to the public community name and using local rather than the global settings.

If I try and use the Device Manager to add a new device, I can interrogate the device to retireve SNMP information until the final "Retrieving Object Value" which times out. If I then re-request this it returns the value.

The most recent changes are the latest updates to VMM and PMP which have been applied.
But I'm not quite sure why these should affect the generic HPSIM identification via SNMP unless they've changed some value in one of the MIBs.

Any clues?

[David Claypool]

Identification for your VM guests is done through WMI, not SNMP...

[Rob Buxton]

Okay, in that case any changes there as the Virtual Servers use the same domain account everything else uses.
Does it use the WBEM Parameters for access?
I've tried resetting the global and server specific parameters.
I've tried setting these to use Server specific parameters and changed the login to use the local server administrator account.
All to no avail.

SSH isn't involved in this is it?

[Joel Rubenstein]

Rob,

Check the management protocols found by SIM for the Virtual Guests. If WBEM is not detected then SIM will not display the correct information.

[Rob Buxton]

Joel,
WBEM is a Discovered protocol.
The majority of these Servers have been successfully discovered in the past.
Something has changed that has just thrown the Virtual Servers.
The Global WBEM Settings use a Domain Account, that is accessible by all of the Servers (all the VM Guests are Windows).
I've changed the WBEM parameters to use the Server settings and changed it to use a non-domain account. But no change.
I've also tried removing 2.01 of VMM, but that hasn't made a difference either.
I'm completely baffled.
So, previously discovered VM Servers are showing up Unknown and new VM Servers are showing unknown.

Another bit of information.
A Server with no SNMP is showing as Unmanaged, but does list WBEM.
It is showing as "440BX Desktop Reference Platform" as a Platform ID.
In fact they all seem to be showing this.

[Rob Buxton]

Having a Product ID of:
"440BX Desktop Reference Platform"
has got to be something to do with it?

I've checked in the Manage System Types, but there's nothing like that in there.

[RobSmith]

This same issue is plagueing me as well. Look forward to seeing a resolution of some sort.

[Rob Buxton]

I cannot offer a solution, mine came right over the weekend.
All VM Guests are now showing okay.
I can certainly confirm SNMP is not involved as per David's comment. One of the VM Guests doesn't have SNMP installed.

The only weekly process I have is the Bi-Weekly Data collection (I changed the frequency from default).
Check that the values for the WBEM settings for the individual Servers are correct. You may want to reset the password in the Global WBEM Settings.

[James Kennedy_4]

I usually install the Compaq Desktop Management agents 5.x on my VMs, that will support some SNMP information properly.

[Jason Cordes_2]

I have been having this exact same issue, and not just with my vmware guest systems, ANY system that info needs to be gotten from WMI has this issue. I have found that if I restart the Pegasus WMI proxy on my HP SIM server and run an identification task I can then get some of these systems identified. But then it stops working again and a new discovery task or daily device identification will knock them all back to unknown or unmanaged. I have had a case open with HP on this for 2 months and am getting frustrated.

I am SO glad someone else is now having this same issue.

Is anybody able to maintain identification of wmi systems? I have my vmware guest systems and a few pc class systems running windows server and they all have this issue. Also, not really important but no pc's are properly identified on my network as well.

One thing I found in testing, if I had HP SIM just polling one subnet with just a few systems on it, it worked without a problem, when I added the rest of my server subnets, it broke. It may have been cooincidence or maybe a symptom.

For those that are not having a problem, how many vmware guest systems do you have? How many subnets do you have discovered? How many total systems do you have discovered by HP SIM?

-jason

[Rob Buxton]

James,
I'm intrigued, what extra information do you get from installing the Desktop Agents?

Jason,
I only have two VMWare based Servers, they're on different subnets. We have a total of about 170 devices managed over quite a number of different subnets.
I do reduce the discovery ranges on a number of the subnets.

[Matthew Maynard]

I am also having this same issue. If I stop the pegasus Wmi mapper service and restart it and run an identify I get all the wmi information. But as soon as the daily identify runs it looses it all again. This is for all servers and wmi information, but fo the virtual servers since all there informatin comes from wmi I get unknown.

[RobSmith]

That sounds right on the nose.
I would be willing to bet that the info disappears right on the daily info collection.

[Rob Buxton]

Well, it is intriguiging, half of mine have gone Unknown again.
Nothing changed, nothing rebooted.
Monday all was fine, I didn't check during the week, other things to do.
Seeing the later posts I decided to recheck.
I restarted the VMM Service and then re-identified the unknown servers and they came back.
Not too sure if I needeed to restart the VMM.

I know that I do occasionally lose the Global SNMP Settings, they revert back to the public and private community names.
As SNMP is not involved here that shouldn't affect things, but it may be related to some kind of odd behaviour in the Global Settings generally.

[Jason Cordes_2]

You guys in no way can understand how good it makes me feel that others are having this issue too. Not that I'm wishing problems on you but I've really been having issues with this problem and getting it resolved. I've given the hyperlink to this thread to the person in support I've been working with so they can see that I am not the only one. That was on Monday however and I have not heard anything back from them. ugh.

-jason

[James Kennedy_4]

Rob,

You'd be surprised how much you actually get out of the Desktop SNMP Management agents. I'll attach a sample report from SIM on one of my VMs. It wont be as pretty without the graphics, but you'll get the idea of the sample data that you can get from it.

I decided to use the Desktop Management agents for my VMs instead of WMI because I was unhappy with the way that SIM reports disk usage when collecting from DMI as apposed to SNMP.

[RobSmith]

But we're still at no official solution within SIM yet. Does anyone else have any ideas?

[Rob Buxton]

Well, looks like I might need to log an official call.

What's happening here now is that every morning all of the VM's are "Unknown" again. I run an Identification task and they're all re-identified okay.

I have two exceptions, one of the Virtual Servers has no SNMP and that changes to "Unmanaged" and another that had HPSIM installed but now just has the SMH and that remains correctly identified.
All still have a green VM Icon.

I run a nightly Historical Data task and I can only think that it is that that is somehow disrupting things.

[Jason Cordes_2]

Rob.....can you please let me know if you get anywhere on this issue with support? I have had a hard time getting through to them on this issue. It took me a month just to convince them it wasn't a VMWare issue.

Thanks
-jason
jason.cordes@enbridge-us.com

[Jim Walsh_2]

I have the same issue as well. Some of our VMs are showing up correctly and other are coming in as 'Unknown'. I do think that some of the 'Unknown' are the NT4 batch of servers, but I need to dig in and see and also check which management protocols are available on these servers.

More to come as I find it out.

[David Wilga]

I too have this exact issue.

Just for kicks, I've set up my discovery process to run against the address range for my servers--hourly.

I can then watch the quantity of servers registered in "System Overview" fluctuate up/down. This is most certainly a matter of the discovery process not reporting the same information consistently.

Additionally, this issue isn't just happening to VM's. I have two HP NAS1200s devices and several other generic servers that will drop in/out of discovery as well. Sometimes they will show up as a server with the correct product name, other times all I get is "unknown."

[Rich Colbert]

Check this thread:

http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=976953

Has your VMM service on the CMS stopped?

[David Wilga]

Rich,

In my case the issue is not tied to the VMM service as the issue happens with other, non-VM servers, including both HP servers as well as generic servers.

But to directly answer your question, we don't use the VMM add-on to SIM as it is redundant to the tool we already use, VCenter from VMWare. That being said, some VM guests will show up correctly, others only show up as unknown.

Adding the "HP Management Agent for Clients 5.01D" does correct the issue, but then the VM's all report themselves as desktops and not servers. That's easily changed with a manual edit, but upon next scan that change gets over-written unless we lock down all the rest of the information as well--certainly not desireable.

[Mikael Rönnbäck]

This maybe doesn't add much but we're seeing this issue on any ESX which does not have its agents properly loaded, if the ESX has the agents the VM's are showing up as servers (without using WBEM in SIM) and if the agents on the ESX have a problem or are not installed the VM's show up as Unknown (or Unmanaged).

[RobSmith]

Still no resolution on this issue? Still having it on my end. Did you ever place a call to HP?
I'll wait a bit for replies, then place my own.

Thanks for any help.