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Wimo
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

monitoring ESX

We are being pressured to start installing Tivoli monitoring agents on the Service Console of ESX hosts, for monitoring of hardware, disk/file system space, and so on. We would prefer not to install any 3rd party agents (other than HP agents). We are also working on getting SNMP set up, with the VMware supplied MIBs. Also working on getting syslog events reported up through a central system. Point being, lots going on in the monitoring area.

What are others doing? Is there something that will run on vCenter server to accomplish the same result? Any kind of virtual appliance? All thoughts/suggestions welcome! Thanks.

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Troy_Clavell
Immortal
Immortal

Utilizing the built in alarms in vCenter4, you can get pretty close to all your hardware monitoring needs. I'd say start there.

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Wimo
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

It will be a while before we are on vSphere everywhere. Looks like that feature only works for ESX 4 hosts. And they will be looking for something to report up to a centralized reporting server ("they," unfortunately, being the dreaded auditors).

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Troy_Clavell
Immortal
Immortal

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Texiwill
Leadership
Leadership

Hello,

Once you mention Auditors you are in the Realm of Security and Compliance so I moved your post.

If you are using ESX or ESXi having SNMP monitoring enabled is not a bad idea however, vSphere does monitoring using several different agents (pre-installed)

IPMI is the one that is used for hardware monitoring. If your monitoring tool such as HPSIM, Zenoss, etc can understand IPMI that is really the best way to go as it would not require anything more than a simple firewall change.

SNMP is another way to go but the SNMP MiBs are really for the monitoring tool not ESX. ESX does not really send out many SNMP alarms and querying them is rather cumbersome and you may not get any hardware information.

In your case, I would ensure the 'centralized' tool understands IPMI and if not then you can try SNMP as a fallback.


Best regards,
Edward L. Haletky VMware Communities User Moderator, VMware vExpert 2009

Now Available: 'VMware vSphere(TM) and Virtual Infrastructure Security'[/url]

Also available 'VMWare ESX Server in the Enterprise'[/url]

Blogging: The Virtualization Practice[/url]|Blue Gears[/url]|TechTarget[/url]|Network World[/url]

Podcast: Virtualization Security Round Table Podcast[/url]|Twitter: Texiwll[/url]

--
Edward L. Haletky
vExpert XIV: 2009-2023,
VMTN Community Moderator
vSphere Upgrade Saga: https://www.astroarch.com/blogs
GitHub Repo: https://github.com/Texiwill
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