Monitoring VMFS Volumes with SNMP in ESX 3.5

[brentcochran]

Hello Folks,

I have found a lot of information about monitoring hardware with SNMP but I am attempting to set up monitors for available drive space on the shared VMFS volumes in my cluster. I have enabled snmp and have everything set to run at boot and have set up my snmpd.conf file with the proper community and trapsink information. I have also loaded all the VMware MIBs into my management application (IPmonitor 8.5). I can see the Dell SNMP traps, as well as the standard volumes in the service console (/, /boot, /var/logs) but the vmfs LUNs don't seem to be showing up.

Is anyone doing this currently that can shed some light on the situation? I'm somewhat new to Linux/SNMP/custom MIBs so it's possible that I'm missing something really simple.

Thanks - Brent

[Texiwill · Accepted solution]

Hello,

I do not think VMFS is part of any SNMP package at the moment. You can use 'snmpwalk' to look at the SNMP stack for anything VMFS related. But I have yet to find anything.

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

[Schorschi]

Use cimom/CIM server, subscribe a handler to watch the datastore object(s). This should generate a cimom based provider/consumer event, which could be forwarded with a small script as a SNMP trap. I am trying to get this working. Of course, using a cimom recevier would work as well but that would not be SNMP based. IBM director for example does this for local DASD scsi RAID controllers.

[brentcochran]

Thanks for the tips guys. I was really hoping to use our current monitoring solution, which is why snmp was the protocol of choice. It sounds like ESX 4.0 will have monitoring and alerting for vmfs volume free space so I'll wait and resolve my issue with an upgrade.

Again, thanks for the information.

Brent

[stm_cro]

Hello Schorschi,

COuld you please share the script that shows how to set up cim subscription?

regards,

S

[Schorschi]

Sorry for taking so long to respond, but I am working on this, it is just back-burner. Not giving up on it, just not actively working on it right now.

[MRSNMP]

If such information is not presented in HOST-RESOURCES-MIB should be.

Suggest you file a help ticket asking for it.

There's another post that showed how to make net-snmp

report additional state by mapping vmfstools cmds to oids.See:

http://communities.vmware.com/message/1401080

And other than that, one would have to write a vSphere script or CIM client

to fetch such data and convert to something your mgmt system understands.

[venkyVM]

Support for HOST-Resources MIB is introduced from vsphere 5.0. U will not get this functionality of monitoring VMFS volumes in esx 3.5.

So VMFS volume monitoring is possible from 5.0  Onwards