Accepted Solutions
Yes, I would recommend monitoring the Service Console. You want to make sure you don't for whatever reason fill up the local filesystem and ensure that it's in good health else you could potentially run into issues with the VMs. In general, I've seen the SC do all sorts of funkiness but the VMs are still chugging along, that tells you how stable the hypervisor and vmkernel is ...and how it does not rely on the SC for running VMs but it does limit your view into the host in terms of management say the hostd/vpxa processes that maybe running.
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William Lam
VMware vExpert 2009
VMware ESX/ESXi scripts and resources at:
VMware Code Central - Scripts/Sample code for Developers and Administrators
If you find this information useful, please award points for "correct" or "helpful".
Its still the same method, I haven't seen any good agents report that VMFS datastore free perfectly though I haven't looked in awhile (Dell/HP agents via SNMP). Best practices is to run very little or no agents within the ESX Service Console and moving forward to ESXi, you don't even have a Service Console. You can use other systems that can communicate with the API or even VMware's management appliance vMA
With vCenter, you should be able to alert on datstore usage and alert via vCeneter by email + SNMP trap. A better way is to write a script that queries via the vSphere API whether you do that from vSphere SDK for Perl or PowerCLI and set a cron job on that to monitor that information and then alert and take appropriate actions. That's what I've done for our setup, is to have a vSphere SDK for Perl script that runs to verify certain % threshold on free space.
There's a PowerCLI script out there that can actually monitor the free space and if it's full, issue a sVMotion of a VM (of course this requires vCenter) but basically you have more power in what you want to monitor and custom tasks which can be setup depending on your requirements.
=========================================================================
William Lam
VMware vExpert 2009
VMware ESX/ESXi scripts and resources at:
VMware Code Central - Scripts/Sample code for Developers and Administrators
If you find this information useful, please award points for "correct" or "helpful".
Yes either agents or SNMP, note that with ESX4, the Service Console is actually a VM that is stored within a VMDK that lives on either a local VMFS volume or FC/iSCSI SAN volume.
=========================================================================
William Lam
VMware vExpert 2009
VMware ESX/ESXi scripts and resources at:
VMware Code Central - Scripts/Sample code for Developers and Administrators
If you find this information useful, please award points for "correct" or "helpful".
Yes, I would recommend monitoring the Service Console. You want to make sure you don't for whatever reason fill up the local filesystem and ensure that it's in good health else you could potentially run into issues with the VMs. In general, I've seen the SC do all sorts of funkiness but the VMs are still chugging along, that tells you how stable the hypervisor and vmkernel is ...and how it does not rely on the SC for running VMs but it does limit your view into the host in terms of management say the hostd/vpxa processes that maybe running.
=========================================================================
William Lam
VMware vExpert 2009
VMware ESX/ESXi scripts and resources at:
VMware Code Central - Scripts/Sample code for Developers and Administrators
If you find this information useful, please award points for "correct" or "helpful".