Hello!
I have a rather strange problem. Today I connected a ftdi serial-to-usb converter to my IBM x3500 M4 (7383F2G) server. The basic idea is to use my vMA to monitor the APC Smart-UPS and to automatically power down my VMs if needed. There are many descriptions out there that describe this as an easy task... but not for me!
1) I assigned the USB device via vCenter (which was obviously recognized correctly) and tried to connect to it within the vMA using /dev/ttyUSB0 or /dev/ttyUSB1 (both created correctly, see dmesg), but the PowerChute Business Edition (PCBE) software wasn't able to connect to the APC.
2) To see, if it had something to do with the cable, the converter or the battery I then tried to use the corresponding Windows APC software in another (WinXP) VM on the same server and that worked without any problems. Auto-discovery found the APC and connected.
3) Now, to find out, if the vMA has problems with serial port access in general, I migrated the vMA to another host (a normal desktop PC acting as my ESXi development playground), connected the APC and, voilà, the PCBE connected to the APC within seconds...
Software: ESXi 5.1 with last IBM Customized CD, vMA is last version from VMware download, PCBE 9.1
I have absolutely no idea why the vMA behaves that way...
Does anybody know, if there is something that I can do to find out, what's happening? I really don't want to waste a Windows desktop license for this monitoring job, vMA should be perfect for that...
Regards,
Holger
