Monitoring of ESXi 4.1

[Bolgard]

Hi,

I have just installed a new ESXi 4.1 server on Dell PowerEdge R300. I have tested the various redundancies (unplug power cable, I get a notification about missing PSU in vSphere Client, unplug one of the hard drives, I get warning of that in vSphere Client, etc). However, all of these warnings only appear in the vSphere Client. That will do me no good if I don't actually login to my host using the vSphere Client!

Is there any way to setup ESXi to send mail when any of these events happen?

Thanks in advance!

[thakala]

You need vCenter Server for built-in email or SNMP alerting.

http://v-reality.info

[Bolgard]

Thanks for the info. No workarounds? Custom scripts, or something like that?

(What did that link tell me?)

[a_p_]

For the stand alone host you can take a look at Syslog (http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1016621) to see whether this a usable solution for you.

André

[Bolgard]

Interesting post about syslog, but it seems it requires a remote host to push the logs to. This means I would need another machine, which needs to be monitored in turn (or else I might miss notifications because the remote host is down..).

Ideally I would like ESXi to just send an e-mail through a SMTP-server I specify (perhaps let me specify a backup SMTP-server, but that might be overkill) whenever a hardware change occurs on the host.

[a_p_]

As the other poster mentioned. For Email notifications you need vCenter Server. You may want to take a look at the vSphere Essentials package. This is offered at a very low price and allows you to manage up to 3 hosts (2 CPU's each) in vCenter Server. In addition to the Email notification you will benefit from additional features. One of them is the option to be able to use backup software like Veeam or vRanger.

see http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/vsphere_pricing.pdf

André

[toobulkeh]

If you don't want to get into vCenter (which I highly suggest you do), you could send the ESXi's syslog messages to a guest VM on that ESXi host who has the job of parsing the syslog messages and sending them as emails via the application of your choice. Not an ideal situation by any means, but it'll save you the pain of getting another machine...

[J1mbo · Accepted solution]

This should provide the functionality you want:

http://blog.peacon.co.uk/hardware-health-alerting-with-esxi/

http://blog.peacon.co.uk

Please award points to any useful answer.

Unofficial List of USB Passthrough Working Devices

[Bolgard]

Thanks for all answers! I'll mark J1mbo's answer as correct, as it was closest to my original request (even if it requires a VM to actually run the script). But thanks to everyone!