Monitoring VMs Running on UCS Blades

[snowmizer]

We are in the process of migrating from HP rack servers to Cisco UCS blades. I have 4 UCS blades running ESXi and are booting from SAN. We have the HP servers configured in HP SIM to monitor for hardware issues as well as VM status. Now we'll be monitoring the UCS hardware inside UCS Manager but I still need to monitor the VMs status. I looked at Solarwinds NPM as we have all of our current HP ESXi servers in Solarwinds. What I have discovered is that we can't add the individual ESXi blades to NPM because we can't configure SNMP (or can we).

Which means as soon as we migrate from the HP servers to the UCS blades we lose the ability to monitor CPU and VM state.

How are people monitoring their VMs in a UCS environment?

Thanks.

[Chris Hewitt · Accepted solution]

We monitor our UCS ESXi 5 hosts with SNMP and use Solarwinds NPM.  It works well.  This are the commands we issue via our VMA (free from vmware) server to a new host.

vicfg-snmp --server  --username root --password -c

vicfg-snmp --server --username root --password -t @162/     

vicfg-snmp --server --username root --password -E

There is probably a way to do it on the console of the host, but I dont know what it might be.

[snowmizer]

Worked great. Now I just have to figure out why my Virtual Machine State says "Not Running" when the server shows it's up and the VMWare tools are running.

Thanks.