ESXi management agents

[bennice]

I've been searching for the answer to this question, and have found a few related threads but no definitive answer.

We're running lots of ESX 3.5 on mostly Dell (PE1950 II and 2950 II) and some HP DL360 and DL380 G5 servers.

Okay, so we know that the PE1950/2950 III models have the embedded USB-attached SD card that we can buy to run ESXi, and the HP servers have an internal USB port under the hood.

I'm testing ESXi booting from external USB on the Dell and using the internal USB port on HP. No problem, except I want the vendor-specific management agents. The concept of ESXi is great, but is not a viable platform if I can't monitor for memory errors, failed hard drives, etc.

For the HP systems I'm using the HP-specific flavor that is supposed to have the management agents exposed so I can monitor from HPSIM. I'm rather disappointed to see that there is very limited information available to HPSIM. As I understand it, HPSIM should show the devices listed under Configuration --> Health Status, correct? And shouldn't the controllers, hard disks, etc. show up in this same pane? I get a pretty limited set of info in HPSIM, and only CPU, Memory, Power, Temp, Fans, and Software Components in "Health Status" and only Model, System Subtye, OS Name and type, and serial number in HPSIM. That's just not going to cut it.

I found an article on how to monitor system components on Dell hardware, but have not completed testing yet.

http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/software/eslvmwre/EN/VES_3i/Systems%20Management%20Document/PD...

If the Dell monitoring works even without the native Dell OpenManage agents but the HP monitoring doesn't include critical system components in their branded version of ESXi, then I see no reason to pursue running ESXi on HP platforms until this is fixed. That's unfortunate for the HP sales guys, because I plan to make my next ESX server platform purchase within the next month or two. If this doesn't work and the Dell management agents do, then Dell will easily win the deal.

Does anyone have experiences similar to mine? Is there something I'm missing that would make HP hardware monitoring expose some useful information?

By the way, the HP-branded distribution is Update 3 - the latest available on the VMware website.

[vmroyale]

Hello.

>The concept of ESXi is great, but is not a viable platform if I can't monitor for memory errors, failed hard drives, etc.

This is the decision I came to (as it pertains to HP hardware) after researching it recently. The lack of drive monitoring alone was a show stopper for the shop I work in.

>As I understand it, HPSIM should show the devices listed under Configuration --> Health Status, correct?

Yes.

>And shouldn't the controllers, hard disks, etc. show up in this same pane?

Unfortunately not.

I see no reason to pursue running ESXi on HP platforms until this is fixed.

Again, this is the same conclusion I came to. You don't talk about your storage specifically, but it seems the only way to get around the disk monitoring issues would be to use the embedded USB key and not utilize any direct attached storage on your ESXi host(s).

In case you haven't seen it, here is a link to the HP ESXi management integration note.

Good Luck!

[DSeaman]

Is there a complete list of missing monitoring features in the HP ESXi? No monitoring of storage subsytems is fine by me, since we would be booting from the ESXi USB key and accessing FC or iSCSI storage. Lack of monitoring of nearly any other subsystem would be a show stopper for me as well. I read the HP guide the previous user linked to, and my quick scan through didn't show any consolidated list of missing monitors.

[bennice]

It is indeed looking like a dead end for ESXi 3.5 on HP servers for me. The end goal is to run the servers diskless with all the virtual machines on SAN, but there doesn't even seem to be a NIC agent from what I can tell, which means we'd be flying blind if we went iSCSI. Since this was targeted for a set of servers in a remote datacenter across the country it wouldn't be in my best interests to pursue any further. One of the other possible targets was to run ESXi --> Lefthand VSA appliances and ESXi --> Openfiler or other SAN appliances for "slow" storage for other apps. Looks like that might be off the table also. I can still run full-blown ESX I suppose, but there's a big push to reduce the number of spinning disks in our datacenters to help keep down costs. During this phase we had the potential to eliminate at least 48 72GB drives.

Who knows? Maybe HP will get their act together on this for ESX 4.0.

[DSeaman]

Have you investigated boot from SAN so you can eliminate your internal HDs?

[bennice]

Yes, I've thought about booting from SAN therefore invalidating the need to monitor internal hard disks. However, there doesn't appear to be NIC agents either, which we would still need since in this case the SAN is connected via iSCSI.

Looks like we're going to have to wait for 4.0 to see if HP got their act together on this, or will just use Dell hardware to run ESXi 3.5.