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nagios - Monitoring VMware ESXi (free) vs. vSphere



I have two hosts running the free ESXi hypervisor. However, we use Nagios for monitoring, and I've received conflicting information about how we should monitor these systems. Are my findings below accurate?




  1. ESXi with free license does not support SNMP monitoring via Nagios. True?

  2. vSphere supports SNMP monitoring via Nagios. True?

  3. Upgrade to vSphere simply requires a license change in the host. Really?




I was under the impression that ESXi does not include the RHEL environment that would allow us to install the Nagios plugins, so it seems weird that a simple license change would suddenly give us root access, and allow us to monitor it. My co-worker said he was recently forced to rebuild a vSphere host from scratch instead of upgrading ESXi, so I'd like to know if that is a requirement or not.



Also, if you monitor your VMware hosts with Nagios, please let me know if you have a better way of doing it.


Answer



I'm a VMware neophyte and I've never been able to understand the naming convention they use in relation to which "version" is which but I will tell you that I recently implemented VMware vSphere Hypervisor, which I believe is the new name for ESXi. It does not support SNMP without a purchased license. If you purchase one of the Essentials Kits you can enable SNMP, which is what I did just 2 weeks ago. Once we recieved our Essentials Kit license, I installed vCenter, added the license, added my hosts, and that was it. I then enabled and configured SNMP and I'm now able to manage the server hardware via DOMSA (Dell OpenManage Server Administrator) and recieve SNMP traps from the hosts via DITA (Dell IT Assistant).



I can't help you with RHEL but I can tell you that you can and need to license the hosts in order to enable SNMP on those hosts.



http://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere/small-business/buy.html




http://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere/buy/small_business_editions_comparison.html


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