Tips and Tricks for Monitoring VMware Servers in Orion v10

Now this chart actually shows you which protocol is used for collecting different data points for each of these different OS. So, for instance, in ESX 3.5 you’ll see we use SNMP for volume interfaces, CPU and memory, which would leverage CPware API, for detecting it as an ESX server, and for collecting total memory. We also use that of course for the guest VM list. Now it’s important to understand which protocols are used for collecting which pieces of data. If you are troubleshooting, why you are only seeing part of the data in Orion when monitoring your ESX servers. This chart and this data is available as a part of the Orion administrator's guide, which you can download from SolarWinds.com out of the support section.

When it comes to monitoring devices in Orion, as you know, you typically use the Manage Nodes option to add a new device, and to run a discovery, or just simply click Add Node. When you go to click Add Node, one of the options that’s new in Orion version 10 is this Poll for ESX option. And so, what you really want to do when monitoring any ESX server is you want to have both SNMP credentials for monitoring part of the data, and VMware credentials to monitor the other data that's available only via the API. Now it’s important to understand these credentials are not Windows credentials, they are actually VMware credentials. And as part of the administrator’s guide, we provided a document that makes it easy to understand how to create credentials within VMware to be used in this software development kit or API. This is actually covered as part of the Orion administrator’s guide, again, that’s available at SolarWinds.com under Support. It’s also included in the ZIP file, whenever you download Orion version 10 and install it, so it should be available there on your server, again, as part of the administrator’s guide.

Now, once you’ve entered in this information, you go ahead and just click Next, and of course we discover the information just like any other time we added a device. However, one of the other things that's new about Orion version 10 is that now it allows you to do a scheduled network discovery, meaning how a discovery run, for instance, every morning at 2 a.m. to find new devices. When you add a new discovery, you’ll see that in addition to the SNMP credentials you used in Orion version 9, you'll also want to enter in ESX credentials or VMware credentials to use for polling and discovering VMware servers. It is really important that you enter this in, if you are going to be managing VMware servers, again, or ESX servers, including vSphere, ESX 3.5, 3i and 4i from the Orion server.

One of the other things to keep in mind is that when you are managing ESX servers, again, via the different data points we’ve shown here and how they are collected. Enabling SNMP, for instance, on ESX 4 or vSphere is not as simple as it was in some previous versions. It is also sort of complicated on ESX 4i. We’ve actually covered this within a document that’s part again of the Orion administrator’s guide. We actually showed you instructions how to configure SNMP for ESX version 3.5 and 4.0, which is otherwise known as vSphere. You can find details on this within that document, again, part of the Orion administrator’s guide. It’s going to walk you through exactly how to do it. So, once again, if you are monitoring an ESX server within Orion, but you are only seeing some of the data you expect to see, you want to be sure that you are checking, see, which data point you are missing. Compare them with this chart to see which protocols are used, and then validate that those protocols are configured correctly on the server. If it’s the API, you want to check the credentials to be sure those credentials are valid. And also of course, if it’s SNMP you want to be sure that the protocol is enabled, that it’s been allowed through the network and that the SNMP credentials you are using are also correct.

This has been Josh Stevens, Head Geek over at SolarWinds, covering details of how you would monitor VMware servers in Orion version 10. If you have additional questions, you want to hit the SolarWinds.com/support site and check it out, or of course visit our community site at thwack.com.