Dell and ESXi – Hardware Monitoring? Good Luck.

Note: The rant contained in this post is probably only relevant for a short period of time. I’m sure that Dell and VMware will make this better. At least I hope so. And I hope they don’t make it better ONLY for brand new servers. I hope they fix it for servers that are six months old too.

My Task: Get monitoring/management alerts for hardware status such as RAID volumes, physical disks, fans, power supplies, etc, for a Dell PowerEdge 2950 III server, purchased less than 6 months ago.

ESXi 3.5 update 4 has the Dell CIM agents and things built into it, I am told. I am also told that OpenManage 6.0.3 can talk to these agents directly. However, nobody can tell me exactly how this works. Can you install it on a VM and then point it to the ESXi management IP? Do you still need Dell IT Assistant, or does it still rely on configuring SNMP traps (a task I enjoy about as much as whacking myself in the shin with a rubber mallet). Nobody at Dell seems to know. To be fair, u4 was only released yesterday. Nobody at Dell seems to have been trained on this yet. They were even surprised to learn that OM 6.0.3 had been released. Eventually one of them told me that 6.0.3 only works with the brand new Generation11 servers. Lovely.

For “older” servers, it’s even more fun. I did hours of research. I downloaded OpenManage Management Station, which includes IT Assistant. The readme file states clearly that 64-bit Windows 2008 is supported – but when the installer runs the prerequisite check, it tells me that “IT Assistant cannot be installed on a system running a Microsoft(R) Windows(R) x64 operating system. What?! There are a ton of other prerequisites too. SQL Express, Java, some portion of Visual Studio (which will trigger a 450MB Windows Update for the entire VS SP1, which will fail and need to be installed manually). Then you need the ESXi Remote Command Line Utility, which in turn requires ActivePerl. You really wanted to install all of that junk on your SBS server, didn’t you?

I gave this one final shot. I actually installed SQL, Java, some Visual Studio thing, SNMP services, the ESXi RCLI, and even ActivePerl. I jumbled all of that crud onto my beautiful, uncluttered, stable server (snapshot first) and started going through the Dell PDF that tells how to enable SNMP on ESXi (msmpa02.pdf, page 10).

I got as far as executing the Perl script, and got this error:
Changing community list to: public…
Failed : fault.RestrictedVersion.summary

OK, that’s it. I am done. Forget it.

So much for the altruistic statement on Dell’s website that says:
“Virtualization is a key path to simplifying IT. Dell and VMware are committed to making virtualization accessible to the mainstream. It shouldn’t be just for the largest datacenters. It shouldn’t be complicated. It shouldn’t require an army of consultants.”

That’s very nice politics but I don’t see it happening. When VMware and Dell pull this together well enough that I don’t need 538MB of junk from different vendors, a bunch of command line scripting, SNMP configuration, and lots of figuring things out, then I will be interested in working out how to get alerts when hardware events happen.

The VI client has all of the health status indicators right there. It would probably be 50 lines of code to have ESXi send SMTP notifications when any of those dots goes yellow or red. VMware needs to write that into ESXi – but they won’t, because they want people to buy the full Virtual Infrastructure for $3000.

Tags: Dell OpenManage, ESXi, management, Monitoring