HP 7.9.0 Insight Management Agents for ESX 3.0.x

[vm123]

Hi,

New version of HP Insight Management Agents for ESX 3.0.x is available in hp.com. It can be downloaded from the URL http://h18007.www1.hp.com/support/files/server/us/download/27853.html

[jayolsen]

DL380 G4. HP also told me they were familiar with this, bumped me up to next level of support so waiting to hear back still.

[garybrown]

expect a 7.9.1 release in the near future....

[J-D]

Hi,

I am running ESX 3.0.2 with all october patches on HP BL20p's. I checked using "ps -ef | grep defunct" and found lots of processes.

So same issue? What is the impact? I haven't noticed slow access or anything.

[jayolsen]

Just heard back from HP. They were able to recreate in their lab. The process grabs a random amount of memory and then releases it so they said it should not have an impact. They are escalating up to their engineer department. All for now.

[vmrulz]

Man I don't know about you guys but I love HP hardware... their software and change control leave something to be desired though. This is another example of something that should have been caught in the QA process. On a seperate note, we are faced with a huge task of updating all our HP SAS drive firmware and Win2k3 SAS drivers for critical bugs on more than 100 of our 800 physical servers, most of them business critical... can you say

They need to test what they implement and implement what they test!

rant off

R

[Schorschi]

HP has more issues with the HP insight agents for ESX than before. They have issues with the OpenIPMI driver as well. We have a case open with VMware and escalation to HP. HP has confirmed there are some real issues with the HP agents. This is a shame since HP quality was significantly better than Dell, and IBM. Now, all three are prettry much consistently poor when it comes to ESX OS support. IBM Director agent has real issues with ESX 3.0.2 at times, we can not get IBM director agent to start, it crashes. The Dell agents (OMA 5.2) have never supported ESX OS well in reference to a view specific issues, including NIC statistics and failures, the Dell agents flat out can not see the NICs that do not have an IP address attached. And now HP has joined the ranks of the inferior it seems.

[brownb01]

OK...so whats the deal with this version? Should we be running 7.9 with ESX 3.2?

And the old version has to be completly uninstalled...correct? anyone have a script out there that uninstalls the old and installs the new?

thanks.

.

[vmrulz]

Run 7.8 for now. The shell script you use to install them has a --uninstall switch. Just do a --help to get the syntax.

[Schorschi]

HP just gave us a work-around that will be published soon, until they can address the issue with the 7.7, 7.8, and 7.9 agents. Uninstall the HP specific Open-IPMI driver, rpm -e <hp-open... driver install name>. HP confirmed that they can use the core Open-IPMI driver that VMware loads on ESX 3.0.x. HP is working on a long-term fix for the issue, but this work-around lets you use 7.9 until they fix the issue.

[jayolsen]

HP said they have identfied the problem and it will be fixed in a future release of the agents. No date though.

Work around if you don't want the defunct processes-

1. Stop the agents (service hpasm stop).

2. Add cmahostd to the "exclude" line in /opt/compaq/cma.conf.

3. Start the agents (service hpasm start).

[Schorschi]

You saying to exclude CMA in addition to uninstalling the IPMI driver?

[jayolsen]

Either one or the other. I did the exclude and the defunct processes are no longer being created.

[Schorschi]

Ah! Ok. HP only recommended to use to uninstall the HP specific IPMI driver for now.

[dmoroney]

Thanks for everyone that contributed to this thread. I've got a workaround that does the trick for ESX-3.0.2 on a BL460c

Remove hpmgmt-7.9.0-vmware3x with ./installvm790.sh --uninstall

Install hpmgmt-7.8.0-vmware3x

1. service hpasm stop

1. rpm -e OpenIPMI-7.8.0-83.vmware30.i386

1. service hpasm start

This procedure forces use of the standard Linux IPMI device driver and hpasm-lite. I tried like crazy to use hpmgmt-7.9 and just couldn't get it to work.

[dmoroney]

I've found another workaround for getting hpmgmt-7.9.0 running on ESX-3.0.2.

I applied Update1 and patches 1002424 & 1002425, and rebooted. This will get the ESX server to build 62488.

I installed hpmgmt-7.9.0-vmware3x

1. service hpasm stop

1. rpm -e hp-OpenIPMI-7.9.0-110.vmware30.i386

1. service hpasm start

[Schorschi]

Right, that is the method I noted before and the one that HP recommended to us.

[dmoroney]

Straight from HP:

Root cause has been found for this hp-OpenIPMI build failure issue. It is due to /etc/issue being modified under ESX 3.0.2 and higher.

The hp-OpenIPMI driver component of the current agents was not initially designed to allow /etc/issue to be edited. It uses this file to identify the OS at installation and subsequent rebuild. This wasn't an issue with ESX 3.0.1, because the hp-OpenIPMI driver doesn't need a rebuild for that release. We agree that /etc/issue should be editable by admins, so this issue will be permanently fixed with the version 8.0.0 release of HP Management Agents for VMware ESX 3.x.

The workaround to use VMware OpenIPMI is acceptable. There is another workaround that allows the use of hp-OpenIPMI with /etc/issue modified. This is to modify the /opt/hp/hp-OpenIPMI/check_install_kernel.sh script to check /proc/vmware/version for the ESX OS version instead of checking the /etc/issue file. This allows the script to detect the OS version properly and therefore rebuild the driver.

As a final note, there will be a release of management agents for ESX around the end of this month, version 7.9.1. This contains some bug fixes, but not the fix for this issue. The 8.0.0 agents release will follow in the new year.

[Schorschi]

Not that I have any issue at all with the above comment. But just to ask... Did HP bless this tweak?

[Schorschi]

LOL... update to my own question! Just as a returned to my email box... I saw HP had communicated to me that this fix as noted above is blessed.

[dmoroney]

Yes, this is a HP blessed tweak. What I posted came straight from HP in response to a case I opened on 5 Nov 07.