Anyone has experience in monitoring the virtual switch in ESX 3.5 ?

[hubery]

We want to use the third-party management tool to monitor the ESX server, I've no idea if I can get some information from the ESX mib about the virtual switch.

Anybody have experience in this ?

[lamw]

Why would you be monitoring the virtual switch? You'll probably be more interested in the your physical NIC's which are linked to your vSwitches, you won't see issues with your VMware vSwitches as you would with a physical switch. You can use something as simple as SNMP which is built right in and track your NICs and connection, you can configure failover policy for your connections and it's always good to have at least 2 pNICs attached to a vSwitch going out to two seperate physical switches. You can also use some hardware monitoring for fault detection, if you use HP Hardware you can use something like HP SIM to monitoring CPU/Memory/VMFS Volumes/Storage/HBA's/etc and other vendor have similiar tools. The MIBs are loaded into your monitoring solution and both VMware ESX and VMware Virtual Center have a set of MIBs that'll get loaded in and when an SNMP trap is generated an OID is linked with that trap and MIB helps translate that to something meaningful like full disk or high cpu and you can alert on it appropriately whether it becomes a page or email notification.

[Texiwill]

Hello,

Could you explain what you mean by 'monitor' if you are trying to get in/out packets etc. Then you are out of luck unless you attach a packet sniffing VM to the vSwitch and hopefully secure everything properly. The vSwitch has no SNMP MIBs available.

Best regards,

Edward L. Haletky

VMware Communities User Moderator

====

Author of the book 'VMWare ESX Server in the Enterprise: Planning and Securing Virtualization Servers', Copyright 2008 Pearson Education.

CIO Virtualization Blog: http://www.cio.com/blog/index/topic/168354

As well as the Virtualization Wiki at http://www.astroarch.com/wiki/index.php/Virtualization

[hubery]

Hi ,[~3279]

. The reason I want to monitor the virtual switch is currently I can

not discover the connnection between phisical server and switch when

using EMC smarts to manage.

I doubt it is the virtual

switch issue(not sure) .The virtual machine is connected to virtual

switch and the phiscal port actually is a combination of 2 or more

v-switches trunk port.

And if I can find the inside connection relationship ,Not only I can create a end to end view of the network and application,but also the

depedence of the applicatins running inside ESX

and vlan connectivity can be easily

figured out. It will be wonderful.

But probably Lamw is correct, I don't need to worry about the virtual switch, just need to care about the phisical nic and cpu, memory performance .

I will try to work out the connection between phisical switch and phisical nic first.

Thank you guys.

[lamw]

If you're trying to figure out what/where your physical Trunks are coming from to your physical NIC, if you're running VMware ESX 3.5, you can eanble CDP discovery on your vSwitches, if this is enabled in your switches by default, you can actually get this information about your physical switches/IP/Networks/etc. To do this you'll want to ssh to your ESX Server and for each of your vSwitches, you'll want to enable cdp with the following:

#!/bin/sh

for i in `/usr/sbin/esxcfg-vswitch -l | grep -i vSw | awk '{print $1}'`;

do

#enable both listening/advertise which is the flag "both" on all vSwitches

/usr/sbin/esxcfg-vswitch -Bboth "$i"

done

Once enabled, you can login to your ESX Serve or VC and go to configurations->networking and on the vSwitches, there will be a bubble you can click to get this information, if you want to pull this out of the commandline, it'll be a little more difficult but you can do it via VI Perl Toolkit/Powershell or using "vimsh" to pull out the network information and you can also do something similiar by parsing out "esxcfg-info -n" and look for the CDP details.

[hubery]

Thanks for your help , Lamw,

Any progress, let you know.