Using alarms on Vcenter to identify (virtual machine or host failures)

[Wajeeh]

Dear Experts,

I would like to know vcenter alarms can be used to identify host failures and for virtual machines ? Consider case where vcenter is a virtual server running on one of the host and that host fails, the configured alarm for email notification will be triggered ?

Thanks,

[cykVM]

That would depend on way the host fails. If it completely crashes throwing a PSOD I guess it won't have the time to send the mail out.

For that you would need an external/off-host monitoring solution, e.g. Nagios or the vCenter on a physical stand-alone machine.

You can trigger alarms for hosts, VMs (e.g. for CPU or memory usage, storage, network connection) etc.. Some good reads on  that topic: Learn how to configure VMware ESX Server Alarms and Setting Up & Configuring Alarms in vCenter 5 Part 2 | VMFocus

[JPM300]

Hey,

Between vCenter custom Alerts, SNMP traps, and vCOPS you should be able to configure the type of logging you want within your environment.  Check what version of Vmware your a licensed for as VMware Operations Manager Standard comes with many of the packages now.  This could give you much greater insight into your environment. 

[weinstein5]

To add if you are running vcenter on a VM I would highly recommend enabling HA on the VM -