VMware Virtual Machines on SIM 4.2

[Paul Davey]

Virtual Machines (VMs) are shown as blank under the "Product Name" field. ESX Servers I am using are Version 2.1.2 or above with the Version 7.1.2 Insight Agents. SNMP is configured on the VM. Anyone any ideas??????

[David Claypool]

See "Best Practices for VMware ESX on HP ProLiant servers" at http://www.hp.com/servers/activeanswers --> Infrastructure Solutions --> VMware

The Insight agents are used only on the service console of ESX to monitor the health of the physical device. HP SIM will use WBEM/WMI to gather informaiton about the virtual machines.

Information on configuring HP SIM for that begins on page 29.

Also, don't forget that HP SIM 4.2 comes with the new ProLiant Essentials Virtual Machine Management Pack. There are 2 licenses good for a 30-day test drive that you can activate to see if you like it. http://www.hp.com/servers/manage

[Paul Davey]

Have followed the "Best Practices" document to begin with..............

[David Claypool]

Okay, here's a troubleshooting checklist:

- WMI Mapper installed on the HP SIM server
- "Pegasus WMI Mapper" shows as started in Services
- HP SIM has a WMI Mapper location shown under Options --> Protocol Settings --> WMI Mapper Proxy
- under Options --> Protocol Settings --> Global Protocol Settings you have configured a login and password for WBEM
- Make sure none of your hostnames contain the underscore "_" character (see below)
- All of the virtual machines are Windows 2000 or later
- Make sure that your HP SIM server can communicate via WMI to the remote nodes independent of the WMI mapper. I recommend searching the MS site for "Scriptomatic" which will spit out VBScript to access WMI classes.

According to the IETF RFC on DNS names, the underscore character is not valid; however, Microsoft allows them to be used in names. That breaks the WMI Mapper. The workaround is to install a copy of the WMI Mapper on the remote node in question.

Also, manually run 'Daily Device Identification' a few times. I also have seen situations where it takes a day for WMI to identify itself.