breathalize

With the advent of vSphere my company has been looking at how best to make the move from ESX 3. One obvious path under consideration was to look at migrating to ESXi, both from the perspective of reduced patching (the default view being a lower attack surface with the removal of the Service Console) and the fact that roadmaps have often alluded to it being the final destination for ESX anyway.

With that in mind, I took to having a look at ESX4i in more depth to fathom where it would fit into our environment. We are very much an HP house, housing both standard and blade servers, so one of the core management systems we use is HP Systems Insight Manager. Its primary purpose is hardware monitoring – knowing when the hardware is either failing or failed being a must for our service assurance.

It was therefore a surprise when I first managed to add my test ESXi server to our existing SIM server (version 5.3), that certain components were not showing up. Most concerning was the lack of a disk subsystem. No array information, no disk breakdown – nothing.

Now I don’t know about other companies, but by far the most common failure in a server for us tends to be a disk. Therefore for SIM not to see it appeared somewhat dangerous. Puzzled by this, I investigated further – my first thought was that perhaps it was a GUI issue and that the underlying monitor was present but not displayed.

So I wandered up to the test server in the CER and disengaged one of the drives to see what happened. The HP SIM display did not change – no email alert, no status change on the GUI – even after ten minutes. By contrast the default alerts inside my test vCenter server, which was seeing the entire disk array inside the Hardware Status tab, immediately started sending alerts and changing status on screen.

This was supremely confusing – obviously for the vCenter to be able to detect the disk and any alerts the correct CIM information was being produced on the ESXi host (I was using the correct HP flavour of ESXi) yet SIM was oblivious to a problem.

Sorry to say after some more fiddling with authentication on SIM, trawling through numerous HP forums and even starting a Google Wave on the subject, I had to call it a day and put the ESXi question on ice.

Then back in late March, I saw something on Twitter announcing the release of SIM version 6 – there were various references made to improved support for ESX4 so I was anxious to see if the monitoring components had been upgraded.

So a swift guest build later (SIM 6 supports 64 bit so a Windows 2008 R2 was my choice) I was busy installing the new version. Now SIM is still not that intuitive when it comes to ESXi – it uses WBEM as a method to query the system so the authentication needs to be set there.

Before setting up a discovery job, a change needed to be made to the event filtering. Under Options > Events > Event Filter Options the ‘Accept unregistered events’ needs to be enabled. Don’t ask me why but the HP document suggests it needs to be there for ESXi.

I then set up a discovery job to look for the server (note the port used for access below – you will need to add this under the Advanced protocols credentials > WBEM/WMI tab:

Once this had been saved the job was started– the feedback is vastly improved in version 6, and you see each type of discovery it is trying and whether it is good or bad. The one you are looking for is the WBEM entry.

Once complete I switched to the All Systems view to see if the server had appeared. It had and I was greeted with the following extra display window.

NB. The auto-discovery is also much improved in SIM 6 – if you discover a host it automatically works out what is hosted on it and adds it as well if required. Very nice.

On clicking any of these categories I was pushed to a status window for the host where I was delighted to see the following – noting the comparison between v6 and 5.3 …

SIM 6	SIM 5.3

Success! Full access to the complete hardware layer in ESXi through SIM … looks like we can put ESXi back on the upgrade table